The great state; essays in construction

GREAT STATE

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HX811 1912 .G78

The areat state

olin

3 1924 030 367 035

THE

GREAT STATE

ESSAYS IN CONSTRUCTION

BY
H. G. WELLS, FRANCES EVELYN WARWICK
L. G. CHIOZZA MONEY, E. RAY LANKESTER
C. J. BOND, E. S. P. HAYNES, CECIL CHESTERTON
CICELY HAMILTON, ROGER FRY, G. R. S. TAYLOR
CONRAD NOEL, HERBERT TRENCH, HUGH P. VOWLES

LONDON AND NEW YORK

HARPER 6? BROTHERS

45 ALBEMARLE STREET, W.
19IZ

COFVRI«HT. 1911. 1912, BY HARPER ft BROTHERS
PUBLISHED MAY, 1912

CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGS

.Prefatory Note v

I. The Past and the Great State i

By H. G. Wells

II. The Great State and the Country-side .... 47

By The Countess of Warwick

III. Work in the Great State 67

By L. G. Chiozza Money, M.P.

IV. The Making of New Knowledge 121

By Sir Ray Lankester, K.C.B., F.R.S.

V. Health and Healing in the Great State ... 141

By C. J. Bond, F.R.C.S.

VI. Law and the Great State 181

By E. S. P. Haynes

VII. Democracy and the Great State 195

By Cecil Chesterton

VIII. Women in the Great State 219

By Cicely Hamilton

IX. The Artist in the Great State 249

By Roger Fry

X. The Present Development of the Great State . 273

By G. R. Stirling Taylor
XL A Picture of the Church in the Great State . 301
By The Rev. Conrad Noel

XII. The Growth of the Great State 325

By Herbert Trench

XIII. The Tradition of the Great State 357

By Hugh P. Vowles

PREFATORY NOTE

This book is the outcome of a conversational sug-
gestion that the time was ripe for a fresh review of
our general ideas of social organisation from the
constructive standpoint. A collection of essays by
contemporaries actively concerned with various
special aspects of progress was proposed, and then
the project was a little enlarged by the inclusion
of a general introduction which should serve as a
basis of agreement among the several writers. This
introduction, which is now the first paper in the
volume, was written and copies were made out and
sent by Lady Warwick, Mr. Wells, and Mr. Taylor
(who are to be regarded jointly as the general
editors) to various friends who seemed likely to
respond and participate, and this book came into
being. A sort of loose unity has been achieved by
this method ; but each writer remains only responsible
for his own contribution, and the reader must not
fall into the very easy mistake of confusing essays
and suggestions with a programme We were not
able in the time at our disposal to secure a sympa-
thetic writer upon the various problems arising out
of racial difference, which remain, therefore, outside

PREFATORY NOTE

our scope. We failed, also, to secure a detached
and generalised paper upon religion. We believe,
however, that, except for these omissions, we are
presenting a fairly complete picture of constructive
social ideals. It is interesting to note certain juxta-
positions ; this is not a socialist volume, and the con-
structive spirit has long since passed beyond the
purely socialist range. Neither Sir Ray Lankester,
nor Mr. Haynes nor Mr. Fry would dream of calling
himself a socialist; the former two would quite
readily admit they were individualists. That old and
largely fallacious antagonism of socialist and in-
dividualist is indeed dissolving out of contemporary
thought altogether.

E. W.

G. R. S. T.

H. G. W.

THE PAST AND THE GREAT STATE

BY H. G. WELLS

THE GREAT STATE

I
THE PAST AND THE GREAT STATE

This volume of essays is essentially an exercise in
restatement. It is an attempt on the part of its
various writers to rephrase their attitude to con-
temporary social changes. Each writes, it must be
clearly understood, from his or her own standpoint;
there is little or no effort to achieve a detailed con-
sistency, but throughout there is a general unanimity,
a common conception of a constructive purpose.
What that common conception is, the present writer
will first attempt to elucidate.

In order to do so it is convenient to coin two ex-
pressions, and to employ them with a certain defined
intention. They are firstly: The Normal Social
Life, and secondly: The Great State. Throughout
this book these expressions will be used in accordance
with the definitions presently to be given, and the
fact that they are so used will be emphasized by the

3

THE GREAT STATE

employment of capitals. It will be possible for any-
one to argue that what is here defined as the Normal
Social Life is not the normal social life, and that the
Great State is indeed no state at all. That will be
an argument outside the range delimited by these
definitions.

Now what is intended by the Normal Social Life
here is a type of human association and employment,
of extreme prevalence and antiquity, which ap-
pears to have been the lot of the enormous majority
of human beings as far back as history or tradition
or the vestiges of material that supply our concep-
tions of the neolithic period can carry us. It has
never been the lot of all humanity at any time, to-
day it is perhaps less predominant than it has ever
been, yet even to-day it is probably the lot of the
greater moiety of mankind.

Essentially this type of association presents a
localized community, a community of which the
greater proportion of the individuals are engaged
more or less directly in the cultivation of the land.
With this there is also associated the grazing or
herding over wider or more restricted areas, belong-
ing either collectively or discretely to the commun-
ity, of sheep, cattle, goats, or swine, and almost
always the domestic fowl is a commensal of man in
this life. The cultivated land at least is usually
assigned, temporarily or inalienably, as property to
specific individuals, and the individuals are grouped
in generally monogamic families of which the father

4

THE PAST AND THE GREAT STATE

is the head. Essentially the social unit is the
Family, and even where as in Mahomedan countries
there is no legal or customary restriction upon
polygamy, monogamy still prevails as the ordinary
way of living. Unmarried women are not esteemed,
and children are desired. According to the dangers
or securities of the region, the nature of the culti-
vation and the temperament of the people, this
community is scattered either widely in separate
steadings or drawn together into villages. At one
extreme, over large areas of thin pasture this agri-
culttiral community may verge on the nomadic; at
another, in proximity to consuming markets it may
present the concentration of intensive culture.
There may be an adjacent Wild supplying wood,
and perhaps controlled by a simple forestry. The
law that holds this community together is largely
traditional and customary, and almost always as
its primordial bond there is some sort of temple and
some sort of priest. Typically the temple is de-
voted to a local God or a localized saint, and its
position indicates the central point of the locality,
its assembly place and its market. Associated
with the agriculture there are usually a few imper-
fectly specialised tradesmen, a smith, a garment-
maker perhaps, a basket-maker or potter, who
group about the church or temple. The community
may maintain itself in a state of complete isolation,
but more usually there are tracks or roads to the
centres of adjacent communities, and a certain

S

THE GREAT STATE

drift of travel, a certain trade in non-essential
things. In the fundamentals of life this normal
community is independent and self-subsisting, and
where it is not beginning to be modified by the novel
forces of the new times it produces its own food and
drink, its own clothing, and largely intermarries
within its limits.

This in general terms is what is here intended
by the phrase the Normal Social Life. It is still
the substantial part of the rural life of all Europe
and most Asia and Africa, and it has been the life
of the great majority of human beings for imme-
morial years. It is the root life. It rests upon the
soil, and from that soil below and its reaction to the
seasons and the moods of the sky overhead have
grown most of the traditions, institutions, senti-
ments, beliefs, superstitions, and fundamental songs
and stories of mankind.

But since the very dawn of history at least this
Normal Social Life has never been the whole com-
plete life of mankind. Quite apart from the mar-
ginal life of the savage htmter, there have been a
number of forces and influences within men and
women and without that have produced abnormal
and surplus ways of living, supplemental, addi-
tional, and even antagonistic to this normal scheme.

And first as to the forces within men and women.
Long as it has lasted, almost universal as it has
been, the human being has never yet achieved a
perfect adaptation to the needs of the Normal

6

THE PAST AND THE GREAT STATE

Social Life. He has attained nothing of that fric-
tionless fitting to the needs of association one finds
in the bee or the ant. Curiosity, deep stirrings to
wander, the still more ancient inheritance of the
hunter, a rectirrent distaste for labor, and resent-
ment against the necessary subjugations of family
life have always been a straining force within the
agricultural community. The increase of popula-
tion during periods of prosperity has led at the
touch of bad seasons and adversity to the desperate
reUefs of war and the invasion of alien localities.
And the nomadic and adventurous spirit of man
found reliefs and opportunities more particularly
along the shores of great rivers and inland seas.
Trade and travel began, at first only a trade in
adventitious things, in metals and rare objects and
luxuries and slaves. With trade came writing and
money; the inventions of debt and rent, usury and
tribute. History finds already in its beginnings a
thin network of trading and slaving flung over the
world of the Normal Social Life, a network whose
strands are the early roads, whose knots are the
first towns and the first courts.

Indeed all recorded history is in a sense the his-
tory of these surplus and supplemental activities of
mankind. The Normal Social Life flowed on in
its immemorial fashion, using no letters, needing
no records, leaving no history. Then, a little mi-
nority, bulking disproportionately in the record,
come the trader and sailor, the slave, the landlord

7

THE GREAT STATE

and the tax - compeller, the townsman and the
king.

All written history is the story of a minority and
their peculiar and abnormal affairs. Save in so far
as it notes great natural catastrophes and tells of
the spreading or retrocession of human life through
changes of climate and physical conditions it re-
solves itself into an account of a series of attacks
and modifications and supplements made by exces-
sive and superfluous forces engendered within the
:ommunity upon the Normal Social Life. The very
invention of writing is a part of those modifying
developments. The Normal Social Life is essen-
tially illiterate and traditional. The Normal Social
Life is as mute as the standing crops; it is as sea-
sonal and cyclic as nature herself, and reaches
towards the future only an intimation of continual
repetitions.

Now this human over-life may take either benefi-
cent or maleficent or neutral aspects towards the
general life of humanity. It may present itself as
law and pacification, as a positive addition and
superstructure to the Normal Social Life, as roads
and markets and cities, as courts and unifying
monarchies, as helpful and directing religious or-
ganisations, as literature and art and science and
philosophy, reflecting back upon the individual in
the Normal Social Life from which it arose, a gilding
and refreshment of new and wider interests and
added pleasures and resources. One may define

THE PAST AND THE GREAT STATE

certain phases in the history of various countries
when this was the state of affairs, when a country-
side of prosperous communities with a healthy
family life and a wide distribution of property,
animated by roads and towns and unified by a
generally intelligible religious belief, lived in a
transitory but satisfactory harmony under a sym-
pathetic government. I take it that this is the
condition to which the minds of such original and
vigorous reactionary thinkers as Mr. G. K. Chester-
ton and Mr. Hilaire Belloc for example turn, as
being the most desirable state of mankind.

But the general effect of history is to present
these phases as phases of exceptional good luck,
and to show the surplus forces of humanity as on
the whole antagonistic to any such equilibrium Tvith
the Normal Social Life. To open the book of his-
tory haphazard is, most commonly, to open it at
a page where the surplus forces appear to be in
more or less destructive conflict with the Normal
Social Life. One opens at the depopulation of
Italy by the aggressive great estates of the Roman
Empire, at the impoverishment of the French
peasantry by a too centralised monarchy before
the revolution, or at the huge degenerative growth
of the great industrial towns of western Europe in
the nineteenth century. Or again one opens at
destructive wars. One sees these surplus forces
over and above the Normal Social Life working
towards unstable concentrations of population, to

9

THE GREAT STATE

centralisation of government, to migrations and
conflicts upon a large scale; one discovers the proc-
ess developing into a phase of social fragmenta-
tion and destruction and then, unless the whole
country has been wasted down to its very soil, the
Normal Social Life rettuns as the heath and furze
and grass return after the burning of a common.
But it never returns in precisely its old form. The
surplus forces have always produced some traceable
change; the rhythm is a little altered. As between
the Gallic peasant before the Roman conquest, the
peasant of the Gallic province, the Carlovingian
peasant, the French peasant of the thirteenth, the
seventeenth, and the twentieth centuries, there is, in
spite of a general uniformity of life, of a common
atmosphere of cows, hens, dung, toil, ploughing,
economy, and domestic intimacy, an effect of ac-
cumulating generalising influences and of wider
relevancies. And the oscillations of empires and
kingdoms, religious movements, wars, invasions,
settlements leave upon the mind an impression
that the surplus life of mankind, the less-localised
life of mankind, that life of mankind which is not
directly connected with the soil but which has
become more or less detached from and independent
of it, is becoming proportionately more important
in relation to the Normal Social Life. It is as if a
different way of living was emerging from the
Normal Social Life and freeing itself from its
traditions and limitations.

THE PAST AND THE GREAT STATE

And this is more particularly the effect upon the
mind of a review of the history of the past two
hundred years. The little speculative activities of
the alchemist and natural philosopher, the little
economic experiments of the acquisitive and enter-
prising landed proprietor, favoured by tmprecedented
periods of security and freedom, have passed into
a new phase of extraordinary productivity. They
have added preposterously and continue to add on
a gigantic scale and without any evident limits to
the continuation of their additions, to the resources
of humanity. To the strength of horses and men
and slaves has been added the power of machines
and the possibility of economies that were once
incredible. The Normal Social Life has been over-
shadowed as it has never been overshadowed be-
fore by the concentrations and achievements of the
surplus life. Vast new possibilities open to the
race; the traditional life of mankind, its traditional
systems of association, are challenged and threat-
ened; and all the social thought, all the political
activity of our time turns in reality upon the con-
flict of this ancient system whose essentials we have
here defined and termed the Normal Social Life
with the still vague and formless impulses that
seem destined either to involve it and men in a
final destruction or to replace it by some new and
probably more elaborate method of human asso-
ciation.

Because there is the following difference between

THE GREAT STATE

the action of the surplus forces as we see them to-
day and as they appeared before the outbreak of
physical science and mechanism. Then it seemed
clearly necessary that whatever social and political
organisation developed, it must needs rest ulti-
mately on the tiller of the soil, the agricultural
holding, and the Normal Social Life. But now even
in agriculture huge wholesale methods have appeared.
They are declared to be destructive; but it is quite
conceivable that they may be made ultimately as
recuperative as that small agriculture which has
hitherto been the inevitable social basis. If that
is so, then the new ways of living may not simply
impose themselves in a growing proportion upon
the Normal Social Life, but they may even oust it
and replace it altogether. Or they may oust it and
fail to replace it. In the newer countries the
Normal Social Life does not appear to establish
itself at all rapidly. No real peasantry appears in
either America or Australia; and in the older coun-
tries, unless there is the most elaborate legislative
and fiscal protection, the peasant population wanes
before the large farm, the estate, and overseas
production.

Now most of the political and social discussion
of the last hundred years may be regarded and re-
phrased as an attempt to apprehend this defensive
struggle of the Normal Social Life against waxing
novelty and innovation, and to give a direction and
guidance to all of us who participate. And it is

12

THE PAST AND THE GREAT STATE

very largely a matter of temperament and free
choice still, just where we shall decide to place our-
selves. Let us consider some of the key words of
contemporary thought, such as Liberalism, Indi-
viduaUsm, Socialism, in the light of this broad
generalisation we have made; and then we shall
find it easier to explain our intention in employing
as a second technicality the phrase of The Great
State as an opposite to the Normal Social Life,
which we have already defined.

II

The Normal Social Life has been defined as one
based on agriculture, traditional and essentially un-
changing. It has needed no toleration and dis-
played no toleration for novelty and strangeness.
Its beliefs have been of such a nature as to justify
and sustain itself, and it has had an intrinsic hos-
tility to any other beliefs. The god of its com-
munity has been a jealous god even when he was
only a tribal and local god. Only very occasion-
ally in history until the coming of the modern
period do we find any human community relaxing
from this ancient and more normal state of entire
intolerance towards ideas or practices other than
its own. When toleration and a receptive attitude
towards alien ideas was manifested in the Old World,
it was at some trading centre or political centre;
new ideas and new religions came by water along

13

THE GREAT STATE

the trade routes. And such toleration as there was
rarely extended to active teaching and propaganda.
Even in liberal Athens the hemlock was in the last
resort at the service of the ancient gods and the
ancient morals against the sceptical critic.

But with the steady development of innovating
forces in human affairs, there has actually grown' up
a cult of receptivity, a readiness for new ideas, a
faith in the probable truth of novelties. Liberalism
— I do not of course refer in any way to the political
party which makes this profession — is essentially
anti-traditionalism; its tendency is to commit for
trial any institution or belief that is brought before
it. It is the accuser and antagonist of all the fixed
and ancient values and imperatives and prohibi-
tions of the Normal Social Life. And growing up
in relation to Liberalism and sustained by it is the
great body of scientific knowledge, which professes
at least to be absolutely undogmatic and perpet-
ually on its trial and under assay and re-examination.

Now a very large part of the advanced thought
of the past century is no more than the confused
negation of the broad beliefs and institutions which
have been the heritage and social basis of humanity
for immemorial years. This is as true of the ex-
tremest Individualism as of the extremest Socialism.
The former denies that element of legal and cus-
tomary control which has always subdued the in-
dividual to the needs of the Normal Social Life,
and the latter that qualified independence of dis-

14

THE PAST AND THE GREAT STATE

tributed property which is the basis of family
autonomy. Both are movements against the an-
cient Hfe, and nothing is more absurd than the
misrepresentation which presents either as a con-
servative force. They are two divergent schools
with a common disposition to reject the old and
turn towards the new. The Individualist professes
a faith for which he has no rational evidence, that
the mere abandonment of traditions and controls
must ultimately produce a new and beautiful social
order; while the Socialist, with an equal liberalism,
regards the outlook with a kind of hopeftd dread
and insists upon an elaborate legal readjustment,
a new and untried scheme of social organisation to
replace the shattered and weakening Normal Social
Life.

Both these movements, and indeed all movements
that are not movements for the subjugation of in-
novation and the restoration of tradition, are vague
in the prospect they contemplate. They produce
no definite forecasts of the quality of the future
towards which they so confidently indicate the way.
But this is less true of modem socialism than of
its antithesis, and it becomes less and less true as
socialism, under an enormous torrent of criticism,
slowly washes itself clean from the mass of partial
statement, hasty misstatement, sheer error and
presumption, that obscured its first emergence.

But it is well to be very clear upon one point at
this stage, and that is, that this present time is not

15

THE GREAT STATE

a battle-ground between individualism and social-
ism; it is a battle-ground between the Normal
Social Life on the one hand and a complex of forces
on the other which seek a form of replacement and
seem partially to find it in these and other doctrines.

Nearly all contemporary thinkers who are not
too muddled to be assignable fall into one of three
classes, of which the third we shall distinguish is
the largest and most various and divergent. It
will be convenient to say a little of each of these
classes before proceeding to a more particular ac-
count of the third. Our analysis wiU cut across
many accepted classifications, but there will be
ample justification for this rearrangement. All of
them may be dealt with quite justly as accepting
the general account of the historical process which
is here given.

Then first we must distinguish a series of writers
and thinkers which one may call — ^the word con-
servative being already politically assigned — the
Conservators.

These are people who really do consider the
Normal Social Life as the only proper and desirable
life for the great mass of humanity, and they are
fuUy prepared to subordinate all exceptional and
surplus lives to the moral standards and limitations
that arise naturally out of the Normal Social Life.
They desire a state in which property is widely
distributed, a community of independent families
protected by law and an intelligent democratic

i6

THE PAST AND THE GREAT STATE

statecraft from the economic aggressions of large
accumulations, and linked by a common religion.
Their attitude to the forces of change is necessarily
a hostile attitude. They are disposed to regard
innovations in transit and machinery as undesir-
able, and even mischievous disturbances of a whole-
some equilibrium. They are at least unfriendly to
any organisation of scientific research, and scornful
of the pretensions of science. Criticisms of the
methods of logic, scepticism of the more widely
diffused human beliefs, they would classify as in-
sanity. Two able English writers, Mr. G. K.
Chesterton and Mr. Belloc, have given the clearest
expression to this system of ideals, and stated an
admirable case for it. They present a conception
of vinous, loudly singing, earthy, toiling, custom-
ruled, wholesome, and insanitary men; they are
pagan in the sense that their hearts are with the
villagers and not with the townsmen. Christian in
the spirit of the parish priest. There are no other
Conservators so clear-headed and consistent. Biit
their teaching is merely the logical expression of an
enormous amount of conservative feeling. Vast
multitudes of less lucid minds share their hostility
to novelty and research; hate, dread, and are eager
to despise science, and glow responsive to the warm,
familiar expressions of primordial feelings and im-
memorial prejudices. The rural conservative, the
liberal of the allotments and small-holdings type,
Mr. Roosevelt — in his Western-farmer, philopro-

17 c

THE GREAT STATE

genitive phase as distinguished from the phase of
his more imperiaUst moments — all present them-
selves as essentially Conservators, as seekers after
and preservers of the Normal Social Life.

So, too, do SociaHsts of the William Morris type.
The mind of William Morris was profoundly re-
actionary. He hated the whole trend of later
nineteenth - century modernism with the hatred
natural to a man of considerable scholarship and
intense aesthetic sensibilities. His mind turned,
exactly as Mr. Belloc's turns, to the finished and
enriched Normal Social Life of western Europe in
the middle ages, but unlike Mr. Belloc he believed
that, given private ownership of land and the ordi-
nary materials of life, there must necessarily be an
aggregatory process, usury, expropriation, the de-
velopment of an exploiting wealthy class. He be-
lieved profit was the devil. His News from No-
where pictures a communism that amounted in fact
to little more than a system of private ownership
of farms and trades without money or any buying
and selling, in an atmosphere of geniality, generosity,
and mutual helpfulness. Mr. Belloc, with a harder
grip upon the realities of life, would have the widest
distribution of proprietorship, with an alert demo-
cratic government continually legislating against the
protean reappearances of usury and accumulation,
and attacking, breaking up, and redistributing any
large unanticipated bodies of wealth that appeared.
But both men are equally set towards the Normal

i8

THE PAST AND THE GREAT STATE

Social Life, and equally enemies of the New. The
so-called "socialist" land legislation of New Zea-
land again is a tentative towards the realisation of
the same school of ideas: great estates are to be
automatically broken up, property is to be kept
disseminated; a vast amount of political speaking
and writing in America and throughout the world
enforces one's impression of the wide-spread influ-
ence of Conservator ideals.

Of cotu-se it is inevitable that phases of prosperity
for the Normal Social Life will lead to phases of
overpopulation and scarcity, there will be occasional
famines and occasional pestilences and plethoras of
vitality leading to the blood-letting of war. I sup-
pose Mr. Chesterton and Mr. BeUoc at least have
the courage of their opinions, and are prepared to
say that such things always have been and always
must be; they are part of the jolly rhythms of the
human lot vmder the sun, and are to be taken with
the harvest home and love-making and the peaceful
ending of honoured lives as an integral part of the
unending drama of mankind.

Ill

Now opposed to the Conservators are all those
who do not regard contemporary humanity as a
final thing nor the Normal Social Life as the in-
evitable basis of human continuity. They believe
in secular change, in Progress, in a future for our

19

THE GREAT STATE

species differing continually more from its past.
On the whole, they are prepared for the gradual
disentanglement of men from the Normal Social
Life altogether, and they look for new ways of
living and new methods of human association with
a certain adventurous hopefulness.

Now this second large class does not so much
admit of subdivision into two as present a great
variety of intermediaries between two extremes. I
propose to give distinctive names to these extremes,
with the very clear proviso that they are not an-
tagonised, and that the great multitude of this
second, anti-conservator class, this liberal, more
novel class modern conditions have produced, falls
between them, and is neither the one nor the other,
but partaking in various degrees of both. On the
one hand, then, we have that type of mind which is
irritated by and distrustful of all collective pro-
ceedings, which is profoundly distrustful of churches
and states, which is expressed essentially by Indi-
vidualism. The Individualist appears to regard the
extensive disintegrations of the Normal Social Life
that are going on to-day with an extreme hopeful-
ness. Whatever is ugly or harsh in modem indus-
trialism or in the novel social development of our
time he seems to consider as a necessary aspect of
a process of selection and survival, whose tendencies
are on the whole inevitably satisfactory. The fu-
ture welfare of man he believes in effect may be
trusted to the spontaneous and planless activities

20

THE PAST AND THE GREAT STATE

of people of good-will, and nothing but state inter-
vention can effectively impede its attainment. And
curiously close to this extreme optimistic school in
its moral quality and logical consequences, though
contrasting widely in the sinister gloom of its spirit,
is the socialism of Karl Marx. He declared the
-contemporary world to be a great process of financial
aggrandisement and general expropriation, of in-
creasing power for the few and of increasing hard-
ship and misery for the many, a process that would
go on until at last a crisis of unendurable tension
would be reached and the social revolution ensue.
The world had in fact to be worse before it could
hope to be better. He contemplated a continually
exacerbated Class War, with a millennium of ex-
traordinary vagueness beyond as the reward of the
victorious workers. His common quality with the
Individualist lies in his repudiation of and antago-
nism to plans and arrangements, in his belief in the
overriding power of Law. Their common irifluence
is the discotiragement of collective understandings
upon the basis of the existing state. Both converge
in practice upon laissez /aire. I would therefore
lump them together under the term of Planless
Progressives, and I would contrast with them those
types which believe supremely in systematised
purpose. _

The purposeful and systematic types, in common
with the Individualist and Marxist, regard the
Normal Social Life, for all the many thousands of

21

THE GREAT STATE

years behind it, as a phase, and as a phase which is
now passing, in human experience; and they are
prepared for ar future society that may be ultimately
different right down to its essential relationships
from the human past. But they also believe that
the forces that have been assailing and disintegrat-
ing the Normal Social Life, which have been, on the
one hand, producing great accumulations of wealth,
private freedom, and ill-defined, irresponsible and
socially dangerous power, and, on the other, labour
hordes, for the most part urban, without any
property or outlook except continuous toil and
anxiety, which in England have substituted a dis-
chargeable agricultural labourer for the independent
peasant almost completely, and in America seem to
be arresting any general development of the Normal
Social Life at all, are forces of wide and indefinite
possibility that need to be controlled by a collective
effort impljdng a collective design, deflected from
merely injurious consequences and organised for a
new human welfare upon new lines. They agree
with that class of thinking I have distinguished as
the Conservators in their recognition of vast con-
temporary disorders and their denial of the essen-
tial beneficence of change. But while the former
seem to regard all novelty and innovation as a mere
inundation to be met, banked back, defeated and
survived, these more hopeful and adventurous
minds would rather regard contemporary change as
amounting on the whole to the tumultuous and

22

THE PAST AND THE GREAT STATE

almost catastrophic opening-up of possible new
channels, the violent opportunity of vast deep new
ways to great unprecedented human ends, ends
that are neither feared nor evaded.

Now, while the Conservators are continually
talking of the "eternal facts" of human life and
human nature and falling back upon a conception
of permanence that is continually less true as our
perspectives extend, these others are full of the
conception of adaptation, of deliberate change in
relationship and institution to meet changing needs,
I would suggest for them, therefore, as opposed to
the Conservators and contrasted with the Planless
Progressives, the name of Constructors. They are
the extreme right, as it were, while the Planless
Progressives are the extreme left of Anti-Conserva-
tor thought.

I believe that these distinctions I have made
cover practically every clear form of contemporary
thinking and are a better and more helpful classi-
fication than any now current. But of course nearly
every individual nowadays is at least a little con-
fused, and will be found to wobble in the course
even of a brief discussion between one attitude and
the other. This is a separation of opinions rather
than of persons. And particularly that word So-
cialism has become so vague and incoherent that
for a man to call himself a socialist nowadays is to
give no indication whatever whether he is a Con-
servator like William Morris, a non-Constructor like

23

THE GREAT STATE

Kaxl Marx, or a Constructor of any of half a dozen
different schools. On the whole, however, modern
socialism tends to fall towards the Conservative
wing. So, too, do those various movements in
England and Germany and France called variously
nationaUst and imperialist, and so do the American
civic and social reformers. All these movements
are agreed that the world is progressive towards a
novel and unprecedented social order, not neces-
sarily and fatally better, and that it needs organised
and even institutional giddance thither, however
much they differ as to the form that order should
assume.

For the greater portion of a century socialism has
been before the world, and it is not perhaps prema-
ture to attempt a word or so of analysis of that
great movement in the new terms we are here
employing. The origins of the socialist idea were
complex and multifarious, never at any time has
it succeeded in separating out a statement of itself
that was at once simple, complete, and acceptable
to any large proportion of those who call themselves
socialists. But always it has pointed to two or
three definite things. The first of these is that
unlimited freedoms of private property, with in-
creasing facilities of exchange, combination, and
aggrandisement, become more and more dangerous
to human liberty by the expropriation and reduction
to private wages slavery of larger and larger pro-
portions of the population. Every school of social-

24

THE PAST AND THE GREAT STATE

ism states this in some more or less complete form,
however divergent the remedial methods suggested
by the different schools. And next every school of
socialism accepts the concentration of management
and property as necessary, and declines to con-
template what is the typical Conservator remedy,
its re-fragmentation. Accordingly it sets up not
only against the large private owner, but against
owners generally, the idea of a public proprietor,
the State, which shall hold in the collective interest.
But where the earlier socialisms stopped short and
where to this day socialism is vague, divided, and
unprepared, is upon the psychological problems
involved in that new and largely unprecedented
form of proprietorship, and upon the still more
subtle problems of its attainment. These are vast,
and profoundly, widely, and multitudinously diffi-
ctilt problems, and it was natural and inevitable
that the earlier socialists in the first enthusiasm of
their idea should minimise these dififictilties, pre-
tend in the fulness of their faith that partial answers
to objections were complete answers, and display
the common weaknesses of honest propaganda the
whole world over. Socialism is now old enough to
know better. Few modem socialists present their
faith as a complete panacea, and most are now
setting to work in earnest upon these long-shirked
preliminary problems of human interaction through
which the vital problem of a collective head and
brain can alone be approached. This present vol-

25

THE GREAT STATE

ume is almost entirely the work of writers, still for
the most part calling themselves socialists, who
have come to this stage of admission.

A considerable proportion of the socialist move-
ment remains, as it has been from the first, vaguely-
democratic. It points to collective ownership with
no indication of the administrative scheme it con-
templates to realise that intention. Necessarily it
remains a formless claim without hands to take
hold of the thing it desires. Indeed, in a large
number of cases it is scarcely more than a resentful
consciousness in the expropriated masses of social
disintegration. It spends its force very- largely in
mere revenges upon property as such, attacks sim-
ply destructive by reason of the absence of any
definite ulterior scheme. It is an ill-equipped and
planless belligerent who must destroy whatever he
captures because he can neither use nor take away.
A council of democratic socialists in possession of
London would be as capable of an orderly and sus-
tained administration as the Anabaptists in Mun-
ster. But the discomforts and disorders of our
present planless system do tend steadily to the
development of this crude socialistic spirit in the
mass of the proletariat; merely vindictive attacks
upon property, sabotage, and the general strike are
the logical and inevitable consequences of an tm-
controUed concentration of property in a few hands,
and such things must and will go on, the deep
undertone in the deliquescence of the Normal Social

26

THE PAST AND THE GREAT STATE

Life, until a new justice, a new scheme of cpmpen-
sations and satisfactions is attained, or the Normal
Social Life re-emerges.

Fabian socialism was the first systematic attempt
to meet the fatal absence of administrative schemes
in the earlier socialisms. It can scarcely be re-
garded now as anything but an interesting failure,
but a failure that has all the educational value of
a first reconnaissance into unexplored territory.
Starting from that attack on aggregating property,
which is the common starting-point of all socialist
projects, the Fabians, appalled at the obvious diffi-
culties of honest confiscation and an open transfer
from private to public hands, conceived the ex-
traordinary idea of filching property for the state.
A small body of people of extreme astuteness were
to bring about the municipalisation and nationalisa-
tion first of this great system of property and then
of that, in a manner so artful that the millionaires
were to wake up one morning at last, and behold,
they would find themselves poor men ! For a decade
or more Mr. Pease, Mr. Bernard Shaw, Mr. and Mrs.
Sidney Webb, Mrs. Besant, Dr. Lawson Dodd, and
their associates of the London Fabian Society did
pit their wits and ability, or at any rate the wits
and ability of their leisure moments, against the
embattled capitalists of England and the world, in
this complicated and delicate enterprise, without
any apparent diminution of the larger accumula-
tions of wealth. But in addition they developed

27

THE GREAT STATE

another side of Fabianism, still more subtle, which
professed to be a kind of restoration iii kind of
property to the proletariat, and in this direction
they were more successful. A dexterous use, they
decided, was to be made of the Poor Law, the public
health authority, the education authority, and build-
ing regulations and so forth, to create, so to speak,
a communism of the lower levels. The mass of
people whom the forces of change had expropriated
were to be given a certain minimum of food, shelter,
education, and sanitation, and this, the socialists
were assured, could be used as the thin end of the
wedge towards a complete communism. The mini-
mum, once established, cotild obviously be raised
continually until either everybody had what they
needed or the resources of society gave out and set
a limit to the process.

This second method of attack brought the Fa-
bian movement into co-operation with a large amount
of benevolent and constructive influence outside
the socialist ranks altogether. Few wealthy peo-
ple really grudge the poor a share of the neces-
sities of life, and most are quite willing to assist in
projects for such a distribution. But while these
schemes naturally involved a very great amount of
regulation and regimentation of the affairs of the
poor, the Fabian Society fell away more and more
from its associated proposals for the socialisation of
the rich. The Fabian project changed steadily in
character until at last it ceased to be in any sense

28

THE PAST AND THE GREAT STATE

antagonistic to wealth as such. If the lion did not
exactly lie down with the lamb, at any rate the man
with the gun and the alleged social mad dog re-
turned very peaceably together. The Fabian hunt
was up.

Great financiers contributed generously to a
School of Economics that had been founded with
moneys left to the Fabian Society by earlier enthusi-
asts for socialist propaganda and education. It
remained for Mr., Belloc to point the moral of the
whole development with a phrase, to note th^t
Fabianism no longer aimed at the socialisation of
the whole community, but only at the socialisation
of the poor. The first really complete project for
a new social order to replace the Normal Social
Life was before the world, and this project was the
compulsory regimentation of the workers and the
complete state control of labour under a new plu-
tocracy. Our present chaos was to be organised
into a Servile State.

IV

Now to many of us who found the general spirit
of the socialist movement at least hopeful and
attractive and sympathetic, this wotild be an almost
tragic conclusion, did we believe that Fabianism was
anything more than the first experiment in plan-
ning — and one almost inevitably shallow and pre-
sumptuous — of the long series that may be neces-

29

THE GREAT STATE

sary before a clear light breaks upon the road
humanity must follow. But we decline to be forced
by this one intellectual fiasco towards the laissez
faire of the Individualist and the Marxist, or to
accept the Normal Social Life with its atmosphere
of hens and cows and dung, its incessant toil, its
servitude of women, and its endless repetitions as
the only tolerable life conceivable for the bulk of
mankind — as the ultimate life, that is, of mankind.
With less arrogance and confidence, but it may be
with a firmer faith than our predecessors of the
Fabian essays, we declare that we beHeve a more
spacious social order than any that exists or ever
has existed, a Peace of the World in which there is
an almost universal freedom, health, happiness, and
well-being, and which contains the seeds of a still
greater future, is possible to mankind. We propose
to begin again with the recognition of those same
difficulties the Fabians first realised. But we do
not propose to organise a society, form a group for
the control of the two chief political parties, bring
about "socialism" in twenty-five years, or do any-
thing beyond contributing in our place and measure
to that constructive discussion whose real magni-
tude we now begin to realise.

We have faith in a possible future, but it is a
faith that makes the quaKty of that future entirely
dependent upon the strength and clearness of pur-
pose that this present time can produce. We do
not believe the greater social state is inevitable.

30

THE PAST AND THE GREAT STATE

Yet there is, we hold, a certain qualified inevi-
tability about this greater social state because we
believe any social state not affording a general con-
tentment, a general freedom, and a general and
increasing fulness of hfe, must sooner or later col-
lapse and disintegrate again, and revert more or
less completely to the Normal Social Life, and be-
cause we believe the Normal Social Life is itself
thick-sown with the seeds of fresh beginnings. The
Normal Social Life has never at any time been
absolutely permanent, always it has carried within
itself the germs of enterprise and adventure and
exchanges that finally attack its stability. The
superimposed social order of to-day, such as it is,
with its huge development of expropriated labour,
and the schemes of the later Fabians to fix this
state of affairs in an organised form and render it
plausibly tolerable, seem also doomed to accumulate
catastrophic tensions. Bureaucratic schemes for
establishing the regular lifelong subordination of
a labouring class, enlivened though they may be
by frequent inspection, disciplinary treatment dur-
ing seasons of unemployment, compulsory tem-
perance, free medical attendance, and a cheap and
shallow elementary education, fail to satisfy the
restless cravings in the heart of man. They are
cravings that even the baffling methods of the most
ingeniously worked Conciliation Boards cannot per-
manently restrain. The drift of any Servile State
must be towards a class revolt, paralysing sabotage,

31

THE GREAT STATE

and a general strike. The more rigid and complete
the Servile State becomes, the more thorough will
be its ultimate failure. Its fate is decay or explo-
sion. From its debris we shall either revert to the
Normal Social Life and begin again the long strug-
gle towards that ampler, happier, juster arrangement
of human affairs which we of this book, at any rate,
believe to be possible, or we shall pass into the
twilight of mankind.

This greater social life we put, then, as the only
real alternative to the Normal Social Life from which
man is continually escaping. For it we do not
propose to use the expressions the "socialist state"
or "socialism," because we believe those terms have
now by constant confused use become so battered
and bent and discoloured by irrelevant associations
as to be rather misleading than expressive. We
propose to use the term The Great State to express
this ideal of a social system no longer localised, no
longer immediately tied to and conditioned by the
cultivation of the land, world-wide in its interests
and outlook and catholic in its tolerance and sym-
pathy, a system of great individual freedom with a
universal understanding among its Citizens of a
collective thought and purpose.

Now the difficulties that lie in the way of humanity
in its complex and toilsome journey through the
coming centuries towards this Great State are fun-
damentally difficulties of adaptation and adjust-
ment. To no conceivable social state is man in-

32

THE PAST AND THE GREAT STATE

herently fitted: he is a creature of jealousy and
suspicion, unstable, restless, acquisitive, aggressive,
intractible, and of a most subtle and nimble dis-
honesty. Moreover, he is imaginative, adventurous,
and inventive. His nature and instincts are as
much in conflict with the necessary restrictions and
subjugation of the Normal Social Life as they are
likely to be with any other social net that necessity
may weave about him. But the Normal Social
Life had this advantage, that it has a vast accu-
mulated moral tradition and a minutely worked-out
material method. All the fundamental institutions
have arisen in relation to it and are adapted to its
conditions. To revert to it after any phase of
social chaos and distress is and will continue for
many years to be the path of least resistance for
perplexed humanity.

Our conception of the Great State, on the other
hand, is still altogether unsubstantial. It is a project
as dreamlike to-day as electric lighting, electric
traction, or aviation wotild have been in the year
1850. In 1850 a man reasonably conversant with
the physical science of his time could have declared
with a very considerable confidence that, given a
certain measure of persistence and social security,
these things were more likely to be attained than
not in the course of .the next century. But such a
prophecy was conditional on the preliminary accu-
mulation of a considerable amount of knowledge,
on many experiments and failures. Had the world

33 D

THE GREAT STATE

of 1850, by some wave of impulse, placed all its
resources in the hands of the ablest scientific man
alive, and asked him to produce a practicable pay-
ing electric vehicle before 1852, he would have at
best produced some cliimsy, curious toy, or more
probably failed altogether ; and, similarly, if the whole
population of the world came to the present writers
and promised meekly to do whatever it was told,
we should find ourselves stiU very largely at a loss
in our projects for a millennium. Yet just as
nearly every man at work upon Voltaic electricity
in 1850 knew that he was preparing for electric
traction, so do we know that we are, with a whole
row of unsolved problems before us, working to-
wards the Great State.

Let us briefly recapitulate the main problems
which have to be attacked in the attempt to realise
the outline of the Great State. At the base of the
whole order there must be some method of agri-
cultural production, and if the agricultural labourer
and cottager and the ancient life of the small house-
holder on the holding, a life laborious, prolific, illit-
erate, limited, and in immediate contact with the
land used, is to recede and disappear, it must recede
and disappear before methods upon a much larger
scale, employing wholesale machinery and involving
great economies. It is alleged by modem writers
that the permanent residence of the cultivator in
close relation to his ground is a legacy from the days
of cumbrous and expensive transit, that the great

34

THE PAST AND THE GREAT STATE

oportion of farm work is seasonal, and that a
gration to and fro between rvtra] and urban con-
;ions would be entirely practicable in a largely
inned commtuiity. The agricultural population
uld move out of town into an open-air life as the
ring approached, and return for spending, pleasure,
d education as the days shortened. Already
tnething of this sort occurs under extremely un-
vourable conditions in the movement of the fruit
id hop pickers from the east end of London into
ent, but that is a mere hint of the extended picnic
lich a broadly planned cultivation might afford,
fully developed civilisation employing machines
the hands of highly skilled men will minimise
LI to the very utmost, no man will shove where a
achine can shove, or carry where a machine can
rry; but there will remain, more particularly in
e summer, a vast amount of hand operations,
vlgorating and even attractive to the urban popu-
don. Giveti short hours, good pay, and all the
ily amusement in the evening camp that a free,
.ppy, and intelligent people will develop for them-
Ives, and there will be little difficulty about this
irticular class of work to differentiate it from any
her sort of necessary labour.
One passes, therefore, with no definite transition
3m the root problem of agricultural production in the
reat State to the wider problem of labour in general.
A glance at the country-side conjures up a picture
extensive tracts being cultivated on a wholesale
35

THE GREAT STATE

scale, of skilled men directing great ploughing, sow-
ing, and reaping plants, steering cattle and sheep
about carefully designed enclosures, constructing
channels and guiding sewage towards its proper
destination on the fields, and then of added crowds
of genial people coming out to spray trees and plants,
pick and sort and pack fruits. But who are these
people? Why are they in particular doing this for
the community? Is our Great State still to have a
majority of people glad to do commonplace work
for mediocre wages, arid will there be other individuals
who wiU ridebyontheroads, sympathetically no doubt,
but with a secret sense of superiority? So one opens
the general problem of the organisation for labour.

I am careful here to write "for labour" and not "of
Labour," because it is entirely against the spirit of
the Great State that any section of the people should
be set aside as a class to do most of the monotonous,
laborious, and uneventful things for the community."
That is practically the present arrangement, and
that, with a qtdckened sense of the need of break-
ing people in to such a life, is the ideal of the bu-
reaucratic Servile. State to which in common with
the Conservators we are bitterly opposed. And
here I know we are at our most difficult, most
speculative, and most revolutionary point. We who
look to the Great State as the present aim of human
progress believe a state may solve its economic
problem without any section whatever of the com-
munity being condemned to lifelong labour. And

36

THE PAST AND THE GREAT STATE

ontemporary events, the phenomena of recent
trikes, the phenomena of sabotage carry out the
uggestion that in a community where nearly every
ine reads extensively, travels about, sees the charm
,nd variety in the lives of prosperous and leisurely
leople, no class is going to submit permanently to
nodern labour conditions without extreme resist-
,nce, even after the most elaborate Labour Con-
;iliation schemes and social minima are established.
Things are altogether too stimulating to the imagi-
lation nowadays. Of all impossible social dreams
hat belief in tranquillised and submissive and
irtuous Labour is the wildest of all. No sort of
tiodem men will stand it. They will as a class do
iny vivid and disastrous thing rather than stand it.
!ven the illiterate peasant will only endure lifelong
oU under the stimulus of private ownership and
dth the consolations of religion; and the typical
nodern worker has neither the one nor the other,
•"or a time, indeed, for a generation or so even, a
about mass may be fooled or coerced, but in the
ind it will break out against its subjection even if
t breaks out to a general social catastrophe.

We have, in fact, to invent for the Great State,
f we are to suppose any Great State at all, an eco-
lomic method without any specific labour class,
'f we cannot do so, we had better throw ourselves
n with the conservators forthwith, for they are
ight and we are absurd. Adhesion to the concep-
ion of the Great State involves adhesion to the

37

THE GREAT STATE

belief that the amount of regular labour, skilled and
unskilled, required to produce everything necessary
for every one living in its highly elaborate civilisa-
tion may, under modern conditions, with the help
of scientific economy and power-producing ma-
chinery, be reduced to so small a number of working
hours per head in proportion to the average life of
the citizen, as to be met as regards the greater
moiety of it by the payment of wages over and
above the gratuitous share of each individual in
the general output; and as regards the residue, a
residue of rough, disagreeable, and monotonous
operations, by some form of conscription, which will
devote a year, let us say, of each person's life to the
public service. If we reflect that in the contempo-
rary state there is already food, shelter, and cloth-
ing of a sort for every one, in spite of the fact that
enormous numbers of people do no productive work
at all because they are too well off, that great num-
bers are out of work, great numbers by bad nutrition
and training incapable of work, and that an enormous
amount of the work actually done is the overlapping
production of competitive trade and work, upon such
politically necessary but socially useless things as
Dreadnoughts, it becomes clear that the absolutely
unavoidable labo^lr in a modem community and its
ratio to the available vitality must be of very small
account indeed. But all this has still to be worked
out even in the most general terms. An intelligent
science of Economics should afford standards and

38

■IMJi TAST AWU THlfi liKKAT STATli;

technicalities and systematised facts upon which
to base an estimate. The point was raised a quarter
of a century ago by Morris in his News from Nowhere,
and indeed it was already discussed by More in his
Utopia. Our contemporary economics is, however,
stiU a foolish, pretentious pseudo-science, a fester-
ing mass of assumptions about buying and selling and
wages-paying, and one would as soon consult Bradshaw
or the works of Dumas as our orthodox professors of
Economics for any light upon this fundamental matter.
Moreover, we believe that there is a real dispo-
sition to work in human beings, and that in a well-
equipped commtmity, in which no one was under an
unavoidable urgency to work, the greater proportion
of productive operations could be made sufficiently
attractive to make them desirable occupations. As
for the irreducible residue of undesirable toil, I owe
to my friend the late Professor WilUam James this
suggestion of a general conscription and a period of
public service for every one, a suggestion which
greatly occupied his thoughts during the last years
of his life. He was profoundly convinced of the
high educational and disciplinary value of universal
compulsory military service, and of the need of
something more than a sentimental ideal of duty in
public life. He wotild have had the whole popula-
tion taught in the schools and prepared for this
year (or whatever period it had to be) of patient
and heroic labour, the men for the mines, the fish-
eries, the sanitary services, railway routine, the

39

THE GREAT STATE

women for hospital, and perhaps educational work,
and so forth. He believed such a service woiild perme-
ate the whole state with a sense of civic obligation. . . .

But behind all these conceivable triumphs of
scientific adjustment and direction Hes the infinitely
greater difficulty on our way to the Great State,
the difficulty of direction. What sort of people are
going to distribute the work of the community, de-
cide what is or is not to be done, determine wages,
initiate enterprises; and under what sort of criticism,
checks, and controls are they going to do this delicate
and extensive work ? With this we open the whole prob-
lem of government, administration, and officialdom.

The Marxist and the democratic socialist gen-
erally shirk this riddle altogether; the Fabian con-
ception of a bureaucracy, official to the extent of
being a distinct class and cult, exists only as a
starting-point for healthy repudiations. Whatever
else may be worked out in the subtler answers our
later time prepares, nothing can be clearer than
that the necessary machinery of government must
be elaborately organised to prevent the develop-
ment of a managing caste, in permanent conspiracy,
tacit or expressed, against the normal man. Quite
apart from the danger of unsympathetic and fatally
irritating government, there can be little or no
doubt that the method of making men officials for
life is quite the worst way of getting official duties
done. Officialdom is a species of incompetence.
The rather priggish, timid, teachgble and well-

40

THE PAST AND THE GREAT STATE

behaved sort of boy who is attracted by the pros-
pect of assured income and a pension to win his
way into the civil service, and who then by varied
assiduities rises to a sort of timidly vindictive im-
portance, is the last person to whom we would
willingly intrust the vital interests of a nation. We
want people who know about life at large, who will
come to the public service seasoned by experience,
not people who have specialised and acquired that
sort of knowledge which is called, in much the same
spirit of qualification as one speaks of German Sil-
ver, Expert Knowledge. It is clear our public ser-
vants and officials must be so only for their periods
of service. They must be taught by life, and not
"trained" by pedagogues. In every continuing job
there is a time when one is crude and blundering,
a time, the best time, when one is full of the fresh-
ness and happiness of doing well, and a time when
routine has largely replaced the stimulus of novelty.
The Great State will, I feel convinced, regard
changes in occupation as a proper circimastance in
the life of every citizen ; it will value a certain ama-
teurishness in its service, and prefer it to the trite
omniscience of the stale official.

And since the Fabian socialists have created a
wide-spread belief that in their projected state every
man will be necessarily a public servant or a public
pupil because the state wUl be the only employer
and the only educator, it is necessary to point out
that the Great State presupposes neither the one

41

THE GREAT STATE

nor the other. It is a form of liberty and not a
form of enslavement. We agree with the bolder
forms of socialism in supposing an initial proprie-
tary independence in every citizen. The citizen is
a shareholder in the state. Above that and after
that, he works if he chooses. But if he likes to
live on his minimum and do nothing — though such
a type of character is scarcely conceivable — ^he can.
His earning is his own surplus. Above the basal
economics of the Great State we assume with con-
fidence there will be a huge surplus of free spending
upon extra-collective ends. Public organisations,
for example, may distribute impartially and possi-
bly even print and make ink and paper for the news-
papers in the Great State, but they will certainly
not own them. Only doctrine-driven rtien have ever
ventured to think they would. Nor will the state con-
trol writers and artists, for example, nor the stage
— though it may build and own theatres — ^the tailor,
the dressmaker, the restaurant cook, an enormous mul-
titude of other busy workers-for-preferences. In the
Great State of the future, as in the life of the more
prosperous classes of to-day, the greater proportion
of occupations and activities will be private and free.
I would like to underline in the most emphatic
way that it is possible to have this Great State,
essentially socialistic, owning and running the land
and all the great public services, sustaining every-
body in absolute freedom at a certain minimum of
comfort and well-being, and still leaving most of

42

THE PAST AND THE GREAT STATE

the interests, amusements, and adornments of the
individual life, and all sorts of collective concerns,
social and political discussion, religious worship,
philosophy, and the like to the free personal initia-
tives of entirely unojEcial people.

This still leaves the problem of systematic knowl-
edge and research, and all the associated problems
of aesthetic, moral, and intellectual initiative to be
worked out in detail; but at least it dispels the
nightmare of a collective mind organised as a
branch of the civil service, with authors, critics,
artists, scientific investigators appointed in a phrensy
of wire-ptdling — as nowadays the British state ap-
points its bishops for the care of its collective soul.

I will not venture here to invade the province of
my colleagues in the treatment of the Great State in
its relation to individual education, in the discussion
of the methods by means of which the accumtilating
results of the free activities of the free collective
mind will be brought to bear upon the development
of the young citizen, nor will I do more than point
out our present extreme ignorance and indecision
upon those two closely correlated problems, the
problem of family organisation and the problem of
women's freedom. In the Normal Social Life the
position of women is easily defined. They are sub-
ordinated but important. The citizenship rests
with the man, and the woman's relation to the com-
munity as a whole is through a man. But within
that limitation her functions as mother, wife, and

43

THE GREAT STATE

home-maker are cardinal. It is one of the entirely-
unforeseen consequences that have arisen from the
decay of the Normal Social Life and its autonomous
home that great numbers of women while stiU sub-
ordinate have become profoundly unimportant.
They have ceased to a very large extent to bear
children, they have dropped most of their home-
making arts, they no longer nurse nor educate such
children as they have, and they have taken on no
new functions that compensate for these dwindling
activities of the domestic interior. That subjuga-
tion which is a vital condition to the Normal Social
Life does not seem to be necessary to the Great
State. It may or it may not be necessary. And
here we enter upon the most difficult of all our
problems. The whole spirit of the Great State is
against any avoidable subjugation; but the whole
spirit of that science which wUl animate the Great
State forbids us to ignore woman's functional and
temperamental differences. A new status has still
to be invented for women, a Feminine Citizenship
differing in certain respects from the normal mascu-
line citizenship. Its conditions remain to be worked
out. We have indeed to work out an entire new
system of relations between men and women, that
will be free from servitude, aggression, provocation,
or parasitism. The public Endowment of Mother-
hood as such may perhaps be the first broad sug-
gestion of the quality of this new status. A new
type of family, a mutual alliance in the place of a

44

THE PAST AND THE GREAT STATE

subjugation, is perhaps the most startling of all the
conceptions which confront us directly we turn
ourselves definitely towards the Great State.

And as our conception of the Great State grows,
so we shall begin to realise the nature of the problem
of transition, the problem of what we may best do
in the confusion of the present time to elucidate and
render practicable this new phase of human organ-
isation. Of one thing there can be no doubt, that
whatever increases thought and knowledge moves
towards our goal; and equally certain is it that
nothing leads thither that tampers with the free-
dom of spirit, the independence of sotd in common
men and women. In many directions, therefore, the
believer in the Great State will display a jealous
watchfulness of contemporary developments rather
than a premature constructiveness. We must watch
wealth; but quite as necessary it is to watch the
legislator, who mistakes propaganda for progress
and class exasperation to satisfy class vindictive-
ness for construction. Supremely important is it
to keep discussion open, to tolerate no limitation on
the freedom of speech, writing, art and book dis-
tribution, and to sustain the utmost liberty of criti-
cism upon all contemporary institutions and processes.

This briefly is the programme of problems and
effort to which this idea of the Great State, as the
goal of contemporary progress, directs our minds.
My colleagues deal more particularly with various
aspects of this general proposal.

45

THE GREAT STATE

I append a diagram which shows compactly
gist of the preceding chapter.

THE NORMAB SOCIAL LIFE

produces an increasing surplus of energy and opportunity, more
particularly under modern conditions of scient&c organisation
and power production; and this through the operation of rent and
■of usury generally tends to

(a) release and (b) expropriate

an increasing proportion of the population to become:

Ca) A LEISURE CLASS

iinder no urgent compulsion
to work

3 2 I

and (b) a labour class

divorced from the land and liv-
ing upon uncertain wages
I 213

which may "de-
generate into
a waster class

which may degen-
erate into a sweat-
ed, overworked,
violently resentful
and destructive
rebel class

and produce a
Social, Debacle:

which may be-
come a Governing
Class(with waster
elements ) in
an unprogressive
Bureaucratic
Servile State

which may be-
come the con-
trolled, regimen-
ted, and disciplined
Labour Class of
an unprogressive
Bureaucratic
Servile State

which may become
the whole community
of the Great State
working under vari-
ous motives and in-
ducements, but not
constantly, nor per-
manently, nor un-
willingly.

46

which may be
rendered needless
by a general la-
bour conscription
together with a
scientific organisa-
tion of production,
and so reabsorbed
by re-endowment
into the Leisure
Class of the
Great State

THE GREAT STATE AND THE
COUNTRY-SIDE

BY THE COUNTESS OP WARWICK

II

THE GREAT STATE AND THE
COUNTRY-SIDE

The dividing line which separates the Cojintry
from the Town, the countryman from the towns-
man, is a comparatively recent phenomenon in
human affairs. Almost to the end of the eighteenth
century — except in a very few great cities, such as
London, Rome, Constantinople, and Paris, for ex-
ample—there were not many members of a civilised
State who were entirely divorced from a share in
the work and the pleasures of the fields and woods.
The great towns of the Middle Ages and the earlier
Modem Period were of a size that would now be
entitled to the name of little market towns, except
for the few of the rank exampled above. As for
their inhabitants, take the case of the woollen-
spinners when they began to build up England's
industrial supremacy: they were at first merely an
agricultural peasantry who occupied their spare
time and the time of the unemployed members of
their families in spinning in the rooms and sheds
aroimd their cottages. They were much more en-
titled to the name of agriculturists than the descrip-

49 E

THE GREAT STATE

tion of industrial artisans. But this is not the place
for a study of the history of the Country-side, suffice
it to sum up the matter by a specific illustration;
the town of Warwick, as it stands to-day, is a fairly
typical example of the normal towns of the earlier
period; while Manchester or Birmingham is a typi-
cal city of modem life. The radical distinctions
between the two classes are fairly obvious; and a
clear conception of this fundamental fact of the
modem city will be a convenient starting-point for
otir examination of the possibilities of country life
under the ideal conditions of the Great State.

It will be for others to discuss the phenomena of
the intervening period of transition from the present
to the future: it is the business of this essay to
describe the Country as it visualises itself to the
mind of one who accepts and hopes for the Great
State as the most probable and most desirable con-
dition of human society, as it will one day be organ-
ised. It will be a frankly ideal presentation of the
Country-side of the Great State. But although it
will be a statement of an ideal place, it does not
necessarily follow that it is based on phantoms of
the imagination. On the contrary, we idealists of
the Great State claim that our visions are founded
on a substantial grotmd-work of hard, material
facts; we reach our ideal by rational conclusions
from things which already exist. We argue from
the known to the tmknown.

At the beginning of this statement it seems very

50

THE GREAT STATE AND THE COUNTRY-SIDE

clear that no rational ideal can admit the possibility
of the continued existence of such an unsightly
social sore as Manchester or Liverpool or Newcastle
or the suburbs of London or its East End. There
will, of course, be no room in the Great State for
towns of factories belching forth yellow fog; there
will be no place for congested areas of slums. But
ottr rebellion will go further than this : for the fresh
air of the country, with its quiet sunshine and open
fields, with its flowers and birds, is all such a
vital part of a rational human life that no civilised
beings will be content to be buried in the middle of
great cities, however healthy they may be made.
Perhaps the most fundamental change in the ideal
Great State will be the abolition of the overswoUen
town and the revival of the saner towns of earlier
days. There will be fewer enormous cities like
New York and Chicago, there will be more boroughs
of the size of Ipswich, Chester, Reading, and York.
The radical distinction between the Country and
the Town will have disappeared.

This change will be rendered possible because the
means of transit — ^railways, trams, light-railways,
and motor traction, perhaps aeroplanes or some-
thing better — ^will be so vastly improved that there
will be no need for people to herd together in closely
packed groups. When it is a simple- matter for the
citizens to move themselves and their belongings
and the produce of their labour from one point to
another, almost the whole advantage of town segre-

51

THE GREAT STATE

gation will vanish. The railways and trams and
cars will then be communal and free services, just
as the roads are communal and free to-day. The
waste of inntmierable ticket-collectors and booking-
clerks will be saved: the citizens of the Great State
will regard transit as a commonplace, which they will
provide without stint and encourage every one to
use without a moment's hesitation.

But there may be some readers who are asking
what all this concerning towns has to do in an essay
on the Country. It has everything to do with the
subject, for we cannot know what will be Country
until we have decided what will belong to the Town.
If the population is to be distributed in a larger
number of smaller-sized towns, instead of in the
huge towns as at present, then it is clear that our
conception of the Country is materially altered by
the fact that there will not be many parts of the
State which are very distant from a town. Here
we reach an all-important factor in the problem.
There will be no need in the Great State for any
rural dwellers to be utterly divorced from those
unlimited advantages of civilised life which can only
be obtained by intercourse with a centralised col-
lection of human activities at one spot.

Town life has brought many evils in its train;
but there are certain invaluable advantages which
only the town segregation can procure. For ex-
ample, a well-equipped opera-house, a theatre, a
concert-hall; art galleries and museums; libraries,

52

THE GREAT STATE AND THE COUNTRY-SIDE

swimming-baths; specialised medical advice and
special instruction; facilities for higher education;
large shops, with a full variety of choice for their
customers; the invigorating interchange of the so-
cial intercourse of large gatherings; all these things
demand a town of a fairly extensive size for their
accomplishment. The torpor of the rural dwellers
of to-day is largely the consequence of having to
do without these advantages of the city: and they
will remain torpid until some method is discovered
of placing them within the reach of the countryman
and woman. The countryman of the Great State
will always be within easy reach of the town. In-
deed, when we consider the organisation of the
agricultural work of this Great State it will seem
probable that comparatively few people will live
outside the town. This agricultural business we
wiU now consider in some detail; after which we
shall be the better able to view the picture as a
whole.

After all, the main purpose of the country, in
the material sense at least, is to pasture beasts and
grow corn and fruits and vegetables and trees. It
is the manufacturing place of our food: and the
people who live there are the producers of animal
and vegetable wealth. The country must be or-
ganised and worked with that end in view. No
one who knows anything of the technicalities of
farming will deny that this work of producing agri-
cultural wealth is done exceedingly inefficiently to-
ss

THE GREAT STATE

day, in England at least. In spite of all the teach-
ing of science, in spite of all the actual practice of
many foreign nations, we are still farming our land
after the manner of rule-of-thumb rustics. Our
large farmers are content with a mere minimum of
produce which will pay a minimum interest on the
capital expended; our small holders are trying to
extract a larger yield by methods which are little
better than the working of a village allotment in
a man's evening hours. There are many farmers
who are doing sufficiently well to pay their land-
lords' rent, with enough over to give themselves a
comfortable living, but entirely ignoring the fact
that the nation is losing all the surplus wealth which
might be grown if they had the knowledge and the
energy. Our small holders are struggling along —
often going under — as isolated units, when every
Continental country is an object-lesson of the truth
that small holdings are only really successftd when
there is close co-operation between the farmers.

But the Great State will have got beyond any-
thing so unscientific as small holdings or so tran-
sitory as larger farmers bound down by the will of
rent-exacting landlords. Both large and small
farmers are as uneconomical and mediaeval as is
the village craftsman when compared with the
great modem industrial companies and trusts.
There is, indeed, a better case for the small crafts-
man in industry than there is for the small farmer
in agricultural organisation. The small holding

54

THE GREAT STATE AND THE COUNTRY-SIDE

which is part of a complicated system of co-opera-
tion — ^and that is its only chance of real success —
is, in fact, not strictly speaking a small holding at
all in any more reality than one field of a large
farm is a small holding. Everything about co-
operative farming goes to show that there is no
good reason why the organisation should stop short
at the marketing of the produce or the buying of
the seeds and implements. If it is well to co-operate
in these ways, it is also well to co-operate in the
production of the goods. And when small holders
co-operate in the management of their farms, then,
to all intents and purposes, they are a large, united
farm.

Under the rule of the Great State, the landlord
and the small and large private farmers will no
longer exist. The State will own the land, and it
will not make itself ridiculous by letting it out in
petty patches, to be farmed on the scale that one
would run a village general-shop. It will, on the
contrary, be divided up into convenient tracts, of
a size determined by the nature of the soil and the
kind of produce to be grown; and these will be
worked as State farms under the control of a di-
rector and assistants, who are highly trained in the
latest science and art of their department of knowl-
edge. Farming will be a profession of the same
rank as medicine, public administration, and edu-
cation. The ideal of these agriculturalists will be
to produce as much wealth per acre as the soil is

SS

THE GREAT STATE

capable of yielding. The farm-workers, likewise,
will be specially trained in their duties by a course
of apprenticeship on the land. The idea of getting
good farming out of untrained farmers and un-
skilled labourers will be thought of as a comical
tradition of the past.

The vast difference between the present amateur
farmers and the professionals we contemplate for
the future, will require some consideration before
it is grasped by the reader who does not know
the ridiculous inefficiency of present agricultural
methods. It is not by any means the fault of the
farmers and landlords: they are in the grip of a
thoroughly bad system. They have to compete
against well-organised co-operating Danes, or against
United States farmers who have great tracts of land
at their disposal without urgent need for careful
economy of every rood. The farmers of to-day are
content if they can get a living for themselves; it
is not part of their desires to produce as much agri-
cultural wealth as their land is capable of growing.
Again, if some foreign competitors can grow com
or potatoes more cheaply than they can be grown in
England, then the private farmer is compelled to
allow his land to remain proportionately unculti-
vated. Whereas, under the system of State farms,
the land would be cvdtivated to its utmost capacity,
until some other use was found for the men and land.
It is always wasteful to allow men and land to
stand idle.

56

THE GREAT STATE AND THE COUNTRY-SIDE

The Great State will very probably not grow corn
in England at all, for it will have under its control
more suitable land as it is now found in Canada or
India. Here we come across a practical advantage
of the Great State system — ^namely, it has, or will
have, a large variety of choice within its own domain ;
it will not be compelled to grow potatoes on a few
feet of rock as do the west-coast peasants of Ireland.
It is this ridiculous economic waste which is the
dire penalty of the highly localised small-farm sys-
tem. The State Farm Board will not waste its
time cultivating bare rocks or inferior soil until it
has brought its richest soil to its fullest fruition; it
will allot each crop to the locality most suitable in
the area. It will grow its com in the vast plains of
the great continents, for com can be easily shipped
from the other end of the world to its consumers.
On the other hand, every large town may have its
milk farm and its vegetable gardens just outside its
boundaries; for milk and vegetables are not easily
carried without loss of freshness. But even in these
latter departments it is probable that improved
facilities of transit will make the highly specialised
milk farm or potato farm — on the most suitable
soil — supplying a large number of towns and large
tracts of country, a reasonable possibility.

Certainly, this present niggling system of little
holdings, or even bigger farms, all starved for want
of capital and compelled to use the wasteful methods
that come from small production, all this will be

57

THE GREAT STATE

swept away contemptuously by a State Farm
Board which sets out to do its work under the rules
of science and common sense. The most carefully
organised co-operative farm becomes a mediaeval
method when compared with the larger schemes of
the Great State. Agricultural organisation will not
be squeezed within the limits of small local necessi-
ties and the stinted capital of needy men. It will
be managed with all the scope and all the national
resources at the dispo.-al of a great state department.
The Great State agriculture will be to the agricul-
ture of to-day what the On Trust is to the oil-shop
in the back streets of a slum district : only the profits
will go to the whole community instead of into the
pockets of a Mr. Rockefeller.

Needless to say, the farm-labourer will be alto-
gether a different person from the man of to-day.
His wages will not be based on a standard of what
is just possible for the minimum of a rigidly simple
country life. He will take an equal share with his
fellow-citizens of the towns in the standard of living
which the community has reached. It is not toler-
able to us to suppose that there should be members
of the community doomed year after year to sacri-
fice their leisure, the larger interests, and all the
variety of life in order that their fellows can be
free. Yet that is the position of the agricultural
workers to-day; they are cut off from the full ad-
vantages of civilised life, pushed into a corner, and
underpaid; they are the serfs of society. The es-

58

THE GREAT STATE AND THE COUNTRY-SIDE

sence of modem culture is the possibility of contact
with a large amount of varied human fellowship.
It is absurd to say that the solitary countryman —
shut off from the main currents of social develop-
ments — ^is as good a man as the best product of the
more complex life of the towns. The rustic may be
as good a man or far better than the slum dweller:
but then the slum dweller is not the product of the
advantages of the town; he is, rather, the result of
all its unnecessary failure. There is a great deal of
absurd sentiment talked of the charming "simpli-
city" of the peasant. We are not out to cultivate
"charming simplicity" — "charming" chiefly to the
patronising observer; we want able and adaptable
men.

And to make a civilised man of himself, the agri-
culturalist must have fuU leisure to get away from
the working monotony of his own trade. The most
satisfactory of trades must become narrowing if they
absorb the whole of life. A portrait-painter or a
poet who gave his whole time to painting or poesy
would be a poor stunted creature, and his art a poor
stunted art. And so likewise with the farmer. A
rural life, with all its freshness, is not a complete
life: it lacks the variety of a fully developed exist-
ence. A man must no ftiore spend his whole time with
bent back, hoeing or digging from dawn to dusk,
than a cotton-spinner should spend all his waking
hours at his loom. When his reasonable hours of
labour are ended, the farm-worker must be able to

59

THE GREAT STATE

reach all the culture and stimulus which are within
the reach of the dweller in the complex town.

We have said that the normal town of the Great
State will probably be of between fifty and sixty
thousand inhabitants. That will be large enough
to make social organisation in the way of theatres
and libraries, and so on, quite possible, while there
will be no interminable circle of suburbs to cut off
the citizens from the fresh country. But the point
which concerns us here is that the rural dweller will
be, by an efficient transit system, in easy reach of
these towns. As we have also suggested, the agri-
cultural workers may easily live in the towns; a
very slight care in the organisation of light railways
and motors may enable them to reach their fields
and return to the towns for the night. However,
the village may also remain under the Great State
system; many people may still prefer to live in
little groups of a few hundreds rather than in a
town, however fresh and clean. Still fewer may
prefer the isolated houses; and these will have the
opportunity to act as guardians of the outlying crops
and herds. But all, villages or solitary cottagers,
will possess the leisure and the facilities for reach-
ing the complex town when they please to go thither.
The general rule will probably be that most of the
agricultural population will live in the "big" towns;
the rest will be scattered in fairly large villages within
easy reach of those towns. Here and there, for those
who have a passion for retirement, will be lonely houses.

60

THE GREAT STATE AND THE COUNTRY-SIDE

One factor which is worth noting in passing is the
fact that, under the big-scale agriculture of the Great
State, work will not be done as it is to-day when it
is customary to see solitary workers in the fields;
for under the centralised system, with plenty of
workers for the job and systematic organisation
taking the place of the present haphazard methods,
it will be much more possible for the labour to be
done by groups of workers which will give fellow-
ship, instead of the dreary solitude which is so dead-
ening to many minds; also there will be better
facilities for controlling the work by expert overseers.

But there is another aspect from which we must
view the Country-side of the Great State. So far
we have seen that the rural dwellers will tend to
collect in the towns as their permanent dwelling-
place or as the habitual haunt of their leisure.
There will be a corresponding approach from the
other side: the town artisans will tend to come out
into the country towns and villages as the mon-
strous city of the present breaks up from sheer
discomfort and uselessness. The public industrial
department of the Great State will not — like the
callous companies and employers of to-day — ^plant
its factories and workshops in the midst of over-
grown cities, when the work can be as eflSciently
done within reach of fresh air and pleasant recrea-
tion. To-day it may pay the employing classes to
huddle all their factories together and build all their
workers' dwellings in long strings of endless streets.

6i

THE GREAT STATE

But when an educated democracy demands some-
thing better, its State transit department will find
the organisation of the carrying trade a matter of
comparative simplicity. When the community works
to live and does not live to work, the first considera-
tion will be to select a spot where men and women
can dwell with the greatest satisfaction to them-
selves; and few people are likely to find so' ace in
paved streets which lead to other paved streets
and so on for miles — the fate of the Londoner and
the dwellers in Manchester. So the factory and
workshop and mill will be placed in the reasonably
sized towns. They may even migrate to the vil-
lage. In this matter we must remember that the
increased use of electricity as a motive power will
render it possible to have power supplied "on tap"
at great distances from the generating stations,
just as gas and water are now supplied. Electric-
ity in the days of the Great State will not be the
monopoly of the towns. There will be no need to
have a smoking stack of factory chimneys in every
village which possesses a factory.

There is another probable development to con-
sider. The industrial artisan and the agricultural
worker will not necessarily be two distinct persons.
The bulk of the work on the fields is seasonal; and
the winter, on the whole, is a slack time for farmers.
A well-organised agricioltural system will get much
of its work done at limited periods, leaving its
workers free to remain in the towns or villages dur-

62

THE GREAT STATE AND THE COUNTRY-SIDE

ing the darker months of the year. The man who
makes hay and digs potatoes will probably have a
town craft — ^for example, boot-making or wood-
work or house-decorating — ^for a winter occupation,
just as the town artisans wUl supply the extra hands
to allow the countrymen to keep their reasonable
hours during the stress of harvesting.

Indeed, in the Great State the Town and the
Country will be much more closely allied than they
are now. They will interchange their work and
their pleasures. It is only the private employer
who cannot manage to admit a fluid exchange in
his system. The public ofiicials of the Great State
will have the names of the whole of the workers on
their lists; and one can take the place of another;
whereas the private employer has his limited staff;
and it is no advantage for him to go to the trouble
of re-arrangement to suit the convenience of his
workmen.

Such, then, is the general aspect of the Country as
it will be in the Great State. There are innumer-
able details which it is scarcely in place to expand
here. There will be, for example, vast tracts of
State forests, which few private owners seem ready
or able to grow and manage under the present sys-
tem. There will be great expanses of open moun-
tains and moorlands which will be left wild and
untouched — ^not to breed stags and grouse for mil-
lionaires, but for the sheer pleasure of the culti-
vated mind in beholding nature at its most solitary

63

THE GREAT STATE

moments. Those who imagine that a well-devel-
oped country-side and a larger number of country
dwellers will necessarily mean the passing-away of
the rural solitude and peace of the woodland glade
and heathered hills, are needlessly in dread. In-
deed, under the Great State there wul be less danger
to the sanctuary of the country-side than under the
present haphazard individualism which is produc-
ing Garden Cities and Garden Suburbs of to-day.
The levelling-up of education will tend to a stronger
desire to live near one's fellows rather than to es-
cape from them. Also, the manifold advantages
of co-operative housekeeping, with common kitchens
and dining-rooms and libraries and recreation-
rooms, will make most people hesitate before they
throw away these advantages for the sake of an
exclusive villa of the present suburban type. So it
may well come to pass that houses will be grouped
together, or built on the block system, even in the
country. When towns are built on healthier lines,
there will not be the same race to escape into a
rather unsightly chaos of straggling suburbs. So
the towns, on the whole, will tend to be more com-
pact. That means that the country will be more
preserved than even now. The Garden Suburb
will not be built when there is no urgent need for
either a suburb or a garden; and that will be the
case when the town is a fit place of habitation, and
every one will have a share in the communal gardens
and be within easy reach of open country.

64

THE GREAT STATE AND THE COUNTRY-SIDE

But on these points it is not necessary to dogmatise.
There is nothing in the structure of the Great State
which will restrict a free choice of dwelling-places —
certainly more free than is possible to-day. We
can only try to foresee general tendencies: and the
impulse of human beings to group together cer-
tainly seems a more permanent and normal develop-
ment than the present tendency to scatter. We all
feel that there is something rather vulgar about a
suburb: it is an almost instinctive judgment: it is
neither a solitude nor a society.

To sum up, the Country-side of the Great State,
as we have tried to visualise it, will be a very differ-
ent thing from the poor and mean extent of small
holdings and scattered cottages which seem to have
such an attraction for the Liberal and Tory political
speakers. We do not believe that there is any per-
verse twist in the human mind which will lead it to
waste its energy in cultivating little isolated scraps
of soil when the results would be so manifold better
under the larger and more scientifically organised
system which, will be possible under the experts of
a State Agricultiural Board.

The desire to possess a few acres of land, and so
many private cows and pigs and hens, is, we are
told, one of the elemental passions of men. We
shaU be more certain of that "eternal" truth when
mankind can choose between his little Whig or
Tory patch and a share in the richer produce of the
Great State farm.

6s F

THE GREAT STATE

There are some who say that the small-holding
system is picturesque. We think of it, rather, as
but a slightly better version of that most hideous
sight on earth — ^the collection of mean wooden huts
and cramped heaps of vegetables which the locally
minded and narrow-sighted politician hails with
pride as the "allotments" and which he regards
as one of the glories of his town. In the light of
modern advantages and modem possibilities we see
the Normal Social Life as the disjointed scraping
for a pittance it has always been. Man has been the
serf of the country-side long enough, and now he
becomes its master: not only to cultivate it for his
profit, but to use it for his pleasure. What con-
ceivable glory to humanity is a servitude to cab-
bages, a prolification of potatoes in the narrow
margins of men's leistire?

WORK IN THE GREAT STATE

BY L. G. CHIOZZA MONEY, M.P.

Ill

WORK IN THE GREAT STATE
I

THE DIVORCING OP WEALTH AND WORK

It was a wise old woman who sat her down in
Pheapside and waited for the crowd to go by. To
the average London citizen she is a perfect picture
of the ill-informed rural intelligence. To the man
who understands she had good cause to contem-
plate the stream of passers-by with amazement, and
to expect it to cease. What, indeed, are all the
people doing who may be seen thronging the streets
of the city of London?

It is not difficult to answer this question in the
negative sense. Observation shows us that, almost
in its entirety, the ceaselessly moving City crowd
is composed of non-producers. The centre of London
is fed from about 8 a. m., the hour at which work-
men's trains cease to arrive at the termini, until
eleven o'clock, with tens of thousands of men and
women, and boys and girls, who are not merely non-
producers, but persons who could not give you an

69

THE GREAT STATE

intelligent idea as to how any useful material thing
is made. Whether our point of observation be the
Mansion House, or the top of Ludgate Hill, or west-
wards at the Marble Arch, it is rarely that there
passes before the vision the dirty clothes which, in
England, we are unhappily accustomed to regard as
the proper costimie of a working-man. We are in a
land of "officials," where an enormous number of
people are traffickers in material commodities, who
eat without sowing or reaping, who dress without
spinning or weaving, who house themselves without
building or planning. From merchant to clerk, from
shopkeeper to girl typist, from stock-broker to com-
mission-agent, from banker to office-boy, from lawyer
to doorkeeper, it is a land in which an army of people
consumes without producing.

Traced homewards, the individuals who form the
City stream may be found living in places widely
remote, from rows of little houses in Tooting or
Walthamstow to expensive and hardly less ugly
red-brick villas in Hendon or Woking, in Hampstead
or Surbiton. There spending the big and little
incomes which they gain by non-productive work,
they support by their expenditure, to build and
repair their homes, to sustain and beautify their
persons, a very large proportion of the inhabitants
of London, and of Greater London, and of the
places immediately beyond.

Not all these attendants on the city crowd are non-
producers. Apart from the shopkeepers and their

70

WUXK iJ\ THE GREAT STATE

assistants and the menials, there are brought into the
economic chain a considerable number of nominally-
useful producers who spend their work at the bidding
of the non-producers who traffic at the centre.

The result, in large, is to bring into the Metropo-
lis and its surroundings, imports of material com-
modities which have been either created in those
parts of the coimtry where men work usefully or
which have been gained by commerce from abroad.
It is not forgotten that London is itself a manufac-
turing centre — are not even food factories to be found
in the filthy abysses of the East? — but the matter
may be put in true perspective by pointing out that
the London County Council area contains only 387,-
000 factory workers in a population of 4,500,000.

It is a far cry from the place of central traffic and
private officialdom to the springs of British wealth.
British prosperity is built upon the possession of
one of the greatest and richest coal areas in the world,
and the British coal-mines are not situated near
London. They are to be found in the West, and
in the Midlands, and in the North. Curiously,
there are not so many red-brick villas near the
springs of work as there are near the centres of mere
traffic. You shall seek in vain in Cardiff or in
Newcastle for endless streams of real and imitation
swells. Mean and sordid, even as measured by the
standard of a sordid MetropoHs, are the highways
and byways of the places from which flow the min-
eral streams which have done so much for Britain.

71

THE GREAT STATE

What was it that Jevons so truly wrote nearly
fifty years ago? I quote from page 234 of The
Coal Question :

"The history of British industry and
trade may be divided into two periods, the
first reaching backward from about the
middle of the eighteenth centtiry to the
earliest times, and the latter reaching for-
ward to the present and the future. These
two periods are contrary in character. In
the earlier period Britain was a rude, half-
cultivated country, abounding in com and
wool and meat and timber, and exporting
the rough but valuable materials of manu-
facture. Our people, though with no small
share of poetic and philosophic genius, were
unskilful and unhandy; better in the arts
of war than those of peace ; on the whole,
learners rather than teachers.

"But as the second period grew upon us
many things changed. Instead of learners
we became teachers; instead of exporters
of raw materials we became importers;
instead of importers of manufactured arti-
cles we became exporters. What we had
exported we began by degrees to import;
and what we had imported we began to
export."
A wise man having thus pointed out for all time
to the British people that the use of coal changed

72

WORK IN THE GREAT STATE

the entire character of British trade, and made the
United Kingdom great, and in the ordinary sense
prosperous, it might be imagined that the lesson
would be so surely learned, especially seeing that
coal-getting is arduous and exceedingly dangerous,
that mining would rank amongst the most honoured
of callings, and that mining districts would flow with
the milk and honey bestowed by a grateful people
upon the indispensable creators of wealth. In real-
ity, the mining districts of the United Kingdom are
devoid of every trace of beauty and of nearly every
rational means of happiness. Take, for example,
the unique South Wales coal-field and its unhappy
valleys. Perched on the hillsides, in close con-
tiguity to the pit-head, gloomy rows of uncomfort-
able boxes shelter those who work and die to pro-
duce a little for themselves and a great deal for the
soft-handed ones who dwell afar off. Once smiling
valleys have been shorn of every natural attribute
and changed into pandemoniums of work and pain.
Even a mining manager in one of these little Welsh
villages — and how few can hope to rise to become
mining managers! — lives in a small and obscure
house where the delight of a garden is unknown.
So melancholy is the impression created by these
places that one discovers almost with surprise that
the people have not lost their gift of song.

Wherever the coal is found, whether it be in
Scotland, or in the Black Country, or in Yorkshire,
or in Northumberland, or in Lancashire, there also

73

THE GREAT STATE

the greater part of useful British industrial work is
necessarily done (for work naturally gravitates to
Nature's power areas), and there also, strangely, are
to be found the chief evidences of an all-pervading
poverty. The nearer the source of wealth, the nearer
the abodes of squalor. The nearer to honourable,
useful, and necessary labour, the nearer to desolation.
Who that has seen the purlieus of our industrial
towns, and who understands that these are the places
where the greater part of the material wealth of
the country is created, can fail to wonder why so
few commodities remain with those whose lives are
spent in productive labour?

It would astonish me to learn that the majority
of the readers of these words reached this point
without feeling an ardent desire to remind the
author of the fact that a man or woman who does
not work with his hands in the direct production
of material commodities is not necessarily a non-
producer. I therefore hasten to add that I am. very
familiar with the fact, and with aU that has been
said about it by the long and dreary line of econo-
mists, and that I shall discuss.it hereafter.

II

THE FEW WHO PRODUCE

Because so many of us are wasting our time,
the material production of the United Kingdom is

74

WORK IN THE GREAT STATE

not large enough, even if equally distributed, to
redeem us from poverty. In the Mean State that
is, the waste of work is so grievous that it is but the
minority of the working population which is engaged
in material production, and even as to that minority
it is most unhappily true that it is largely engaged
in making material things which ought not to be
produced at all — things which the Great State of
our dreams would ban as economic indecencies.

It is quite simple to demonstrate the truth of
these propositions.

In 1906 I took a good deal of interest in the pas-
sage into law of the Census of Production Act of the
United Kingdom. It was a belated piece of legisla-
tion, and its clauses are marked with that timidity
which has been the curse of so many British legis-
lative endeavours, and which is largely responsible
for the accusing arrears of legislation which are be-
ginning to teU seriously in Britain. I tried to get
an inquiry into wages and capital added to its pro-
visions, but the House of Commons, although, as
subsequent events have shown, then within measur-
able distance of a general strike against low wages
(I correct this article for press on March 15, 191 2,
when a general strike of miners is bringing trade to
a standstill), was not sufficiently interested to order
a compulsory examination of wages and capital.
Nevertheless, the Act has given us most valuable
if incomplete information. For the first time we
have a measurement of the value of the material

7S

THE GREAT STATE

production of British industries, accompanied by a
record of the number of wage-earners and salaried
persons, men, women, boys, and girls, who did the
work which yielded the commodities. The harvest
of British productive work is measured and spread
out before us.

The first thing to observe is a thing amazing to
the man who has not acquainted himself with the
rougher measurement of productive workers ex-
hibited by the ordinary Census of the United
Kingdom.

There were, in 1907, the year in which the Board
of Trade conducted the Census of Production, about
20,000,000 men, women, boys, and girls engaged in
occupations for gain. As the population in 1907
was about 44,000,000, it follows that nearly one-
half of the entire population was working for gain.
When allowance is made for infants, school children,
and the aged, we get a decided impression that the
British people are a busy people. And indeed
they are.

But what are they busy with?

Let us see what the Census of Production tells
us as to the number of people occupied in material
output in 1907.

The Census dealt with every sort and kind of
material production for gain, save and except agri-
cultural production. It covered, that is, not only
the manufacturing accompHshed in factories, mills,
and workshops, but the preparation of food for gain

76

WORK IN THE GREAT STATE

in bakeries, the brewing of beer, the distilling of
spirits, and the public works of construction carried
out by State departments and local authorities,
and it included the value of repairs. It also covered
all mining and quarrying. The only exception ap-
pears to be the manufacturing of food by restaurants.

Each employer returned the number of salaried
persons and wage-earners employed by him, with
details as to the proportions of men, women, boys,
and girls composing each group. To be precise,
those aged eighteen years and over were distin-
guished from those under eighteen, for each sex.

The inquiry showed that about 6,900,000 pefsons
were engaged in producing in 1907, and that of
these 6,400,000 were wage-earners, officered by some
500,000 salaried persons. This is sufficiently re-
markable, but the more closely the figures are
examined the more remarkable they appear. Fur-
ther analysis shows that the 6,400,000 wage-earners
were thus made up:

United Kingdom Industrial Employment
IN 1907

Males aged 18 years and over. . 4,250,000
Females " 18 " " " . . 1,200,000
Males and Females under 18 ... . 950,000

Total 6,400,000

Thus, in the year 1907 — and the facts in 1912
can exhibit little variation — there were only 4,250,000

77

THE GREAT STATE

men occupied in industry in the United Kingdom,
terming a man a male person over eighteen years of
age.

And how many men, counting as men the males
over eighteen years of age, did the United Kingdom
boast of in 1907 ? The answer is 13,000,000. So that,
in what is a great manufacturing country — a coun-
try reputed to be industriaHsed more than any other
country — less than one-third of the males over eighteen
are actually engaged in industry. And not all these
are manufacturing. Nearly 1,000,000 of them are
engaged in mining and quarrying, so that not more
than about one in four of our male population over
eighteen is a "manufacturer."

Let us see what addition has to be made to our
4,200,000 miners and manufacturers on account of
agricultural production. To judge by the lastCen-
sus of 1 90 1, and the subsequent drain through emi-
gration, we had in 1907 about 2,000,000 persons
engaged in agriculture, including farmers, farmers'
relatives working on their farms, agricultural la-
bourers, market gardeners, nurserymen, dairymen,
etc., and of these about 1,600,000 were males over
eighteen.

Therefore, reviewing material production of every
sort and kind, save only the trifling and negligible
exceptions which have been mentioned, the number
of males over eighteen engaged in material output in
1907 was only about 5,800,000. This total does not
include the captains of industry, but their inclusion

78

WORK IN THE GREAT STATE

TOuld, of course, scarcely affect the total. There
ire only some 250,000 registered factories and work-
hops in the United Kingdom.

It is true that we supplement the labour of these
;, 800,000 "men" by employing in industry 1,200,000
emales aged eighteen and over, and some 950,000 boys
md girls, and that in agriculture there are perhaps
I further 400,000 women, boys, and girls employed.
These additions, however, merely serve to raise the
;otal of productive workers to 8,400,000, or, if we
;hrow in the 500,000 salaried persons connected
vith the industrial operations, 8,900,000. We thus
irrive at the extraordinary conclusion that, in a
lation containing in 1907 about 44,000,000 of peo-
)le, about 20,000,000 of whom figure in the Census
IS "engaged in occupations," only about 9,000,000,
)r less than one-half of those working for gain, are
•ngaged in either agricultural or industrial produc-
ion.

But let us in particular consider the case of the
nales. In 1907 there were about 14,000,000 male
Dersons "engaged in occupations." Of these 14,-
)oo,ooo males, as we have already seen, there
vere about 13,000,000 aged eighteen and upwards,
[ncluding both industry and agriculture, the
lumber of such males at work was only about
5,850,000.

So that only 45 per cent, of our males over eigh-
teen are direct producers of material commodi-
ties.

79

THE GREAT STATE

Is it reasonable, or is it not rather incredible, that
the labours of the remainder of the working popu-
lation should be needed to transport and to dis-
tribute the material production of so small a pro-
portion of our men, aided by a couple of million
women and children?

Make every conceivable allowance for the very
real productive powers of such workers as railway
servants and carmen, seamen and dockers, ware-
housemen and storekeepers, postmen and teleg-
raphists, with a due proportion of wholesale and
retail distributors, architects, designers, doctors,
nurses, and teachers, and it still remains a thing
most significant and most unsatisfactory that, amid
a multitude of workers, so small a proportion should
be employed in making those material things a
lack of which constitutes poverty in the physical
sense.

Take the case of retail distribution. It is the
extraordinary fact that there are 1,500,000 shop-
keepers and shop assistants in the United Kingdom,
in a community which numbers only some 9,000,000
families. That is to say, there is one retail distribu-
tor to each six families in the country, an absurdly
high proportion. And this figure takes no accoimt
of the carmen, horsemen, stablemen, and other
agents also concerned in the process of retailing.
It excludes, also, the retaiUng of coal, which is ac-
complished, not by shopkeepers, but by "coal-mer-
chants" with another army of clerks, vans, carmen,

80

WORK IN THE GREAT STATE

tiorsemen, labourers, etc. And the number of retail
agents is equally striking when compared with the
Qumber of producers. As we have seen, there are
Dnly 8,400,000 men, women, boys, and girls engage'di
in industrial and agricultural production. The
shopkeepers and their assistants number i for every
5.6 persons engaged in production.

And as for the mass of clerks, agents, travellers,
brokers, merchants, canvassers, and other between-
agents, their number is altogether disproportionate,
either to the number of producers or to the aggregate
of those producers' outputs.

Ill

THE WASTE OF PRODUCERS' WORK

We must not readily conclude that we have even
as many as 4,250,000 men, 1,200,000 women, and
950,000 boys and girls engaged in useful industrial
production.

For one thing, the Census of Production was taken
in an exceedingly good year of trade, when employ-
ment was good. If it had been taken in the follow-
ing year, the number of producers would have been
shown as about 4 per cent, less than the above
figures. We have also to take account of short
time and of the operation of industrial disease and
accident, which cut deeply into the available work-
ing time of industrial workers.

81 G

THE GREAT STATE

But these considerations, important as they are,
pale before the waste of work which is involved in
industrial processes that are but the servants of
unnecessary competition.

Analysis of the work of the few millions of indus-
trial producers shows us that no small part of them
are engaged, not in the manufacture of things of
economic value or personal utility, but in the manu-
facture of articles or commodities which merely serve
the purpose of competitive selling.

Take the printing trade, for example. An un-
measurable but certainly large proportion of the
men, women, boys, and girls who rank in the Census
of Production as working in the printing trades are
engaged in printing, not books or newspapers or
magazines, but advertising matter, competitive price-
lists, wrappers, trade labels, bill-heads, account books,
posters, etc., which are merely called into existence
in the struggle of various competitive sellers to
reach the consumer. The consumer has to pay the
bill for all this printing in the price of the competi-
tive articles which he buys; but what does he gain
by the mass of printing which is daily thrust upon
him? He is bewildered by the printed appeals
which are made to him, which are nearly always
misleading in some degree, and which in many cases
are deliberately intended to deceive. The news-
paper reader pays for his newspaper, he fondly be-
lieves, only a halfpenny or a penny. As a matter of
fact, he pays for his newspaper in two ways; there

82

WORK IN THE GREAT STATE

is the direct payment of a copper to the news-agent,
and there is the indirect payment which he contrib-
utes in the prices of things which he buys from trades-
men, prices which are calculated to cover the cost
of the advertisements which he fondly imagines are
presented to him by the newspaper proprietors.
One feels sorry for the uninstructed man who, de-
siring to buy, say, a pianoforte, consults advertise-
ments as the best means of discovering where to
buy.

And not printing alone, but many other trades
give a considerable part of their output to the uses
of advertisement. Iron, copper, zinc, enamel,
colour, ink, paper, string, gum, wood — the list of
articles which are built up into advertisements to
deface towns, despoil scenery, and confuse the
traveller is a lengthy one. The workers upon these
things are amongst our few "producers," but their
production is in vain.

In recent years, the absurdity of competition by
advertisement, which is sufficiently obvious in re-
gard to what are commonly called manufactures,
has been imported even into the domain of food
supply. Enormous sums are spent by competitive
firms to persuade the public that there are a number
of different individual teas, butters, or bacons.
Tea bought in the ordinary process in the London
market is put up into special packets and labelled
with fancy names and advertised in terms which
suggest that it possesses individual quality like a

83

THE GREAT STATE

Beethoven symphony. The consumer does not
dream that, in 191 1, 348,000,000 pounds of tea were
imported into the United Kingdom for the small sum
of £13,000,000, or only gd. per pound, and that when
he buys tea he'pays a tax of ^d. to the government
and a tax of from 4d. to 8d. and upwards per pound
to the host of wholesale and retail middlemen, rail-
way shareholders, advertising agents, brokers, etc.,
who stand between tea at the port and tea on the
breakfast-table. To furnish forth the newspaper ad-
vertisements, the posters, the lead wrappers, the
paper wrappers, the boxes, and the other parapher-
nalia connected with the tea-selling means a good
deal of "manufacturing," but it is manufacturing
which from the point of view of economic production
is for the most part a good deal worse than useless.
I hope no one will suppose from this that retail
grocers make big net profits on tea, for they do not.
Their gross profit is about 20 per cent, on the whole-
sale price at which they buy, but much of that goes
in rent, etc. The great waste of work brings small
net gain out of large gross profit to ordinary shop-
keepers.

And if the manufacturing of competitive materials
is bad, the manufacturing of rubbish in nearly every
department of industry is worse. I repeat here
what I have said before, that rubbish-making is our
largest industry. It is one of the saddest things in
our industrial system to see an ingenious machine,
worked by an intelligent man, and driven by an

84

WORK IN THE GREAT STATE

engine which is a triumph of human skill, exercised
upon shoddy material. The average workman is
so used to working upon rubbish that he fails to
perceive the irony of it. The bricklayer takes the
bricks and mortar as they come along; it is all the
same to him whether the bricks be soft or hard, or
whether the mortar be good cement or pure mud.
The carpenter uses the timber supplied to him by
the jerry-builder, however green, however shaky.
The weaver will as readily weave you a shoddy weft
on a cotton warp as produce a piece of good, honest
woollen cloth. Twenty per cent, of the material used
by the British woollen and worsted industries consists oj
shoddy. This shoddy is worked up with pure wool
in various proportions. It is safe to say that no
poor man ever wears a garment wholly made of
honest woollen material. If our workmen began
questioning their materials, I really shudder to think
what would happen to their next wages bill, or to what
sort of dimensions our industrial production would be
reduced. We are surrounded by rubbish on every
side. All but a tiny proportion of the houses of
the country are furnished with rubbish and cur-
tained with rubbish and fastened up with rubbish.
The greater part of household coal, which costs its
getters so much in life and its purchasers so much
in money, is wasted in rubbish grates and rubbish
ranges. It is impossible to exaggerate in this con-
nection; the reality is an exaggeration beyond all
imagining.

85

THE GREAT STATE

I cannot pretend to express these things of which
I have written in statistical terms. I cannot pre-
tend to decide how many of the 4,250,000 producing
males over eighteen make honest stuff and how
many, on the other hand, are amongst the rubbish
producers. It is only too clear, however, that
the rubbish producers are an exceedingly large part
of the whole, and that the number of people in
the country who make articles worth buying is
ridiculously small.

IV
A STARVED PRODUCTION

From what has been said, no one will be sur-
prised to learn that the output of our mines, mills,
factories, and workshops, while actually great, is
small relatively to the labour power of the na-
tion.

Passing from the workers to the results of their
work, the Census of Production shows us for each
producing industry (i) the factory value of the
output, (2) the cost of the materials used in the
work, and (3), by subtraction, the value added by
each trade to the materials which it uses. By this
method the duphcation of values is avoided, and
we get a true aggregate of the total net value of
British production.

86

WORK IN THE GREAT STATE

It is shown that the net output of all British
industries thus arrived at in 1907 was £712,000,000,
or about £100 for each man, woman, boy, and girl
employed.

This total is exclusive of the value of materials
either imported from abroad or bought from
British agriculture.

Now let us see what was the total value of mate-
rial commodities gained by the United Kingdom
in 1907: (i) through productive industry, (2)
through agriculture, (3) through the exchange of
part of British material production for foreign
produce, and (4) through any material imports
gained from abroad through services rendered
to people abroad. It is quite simple to do
this.

First, as to agricultiire. We are still waiting the
result of the voluntary Census of agrictdtural pro-
duction which the Board of Agriculture conducted
in 1907. It is probable, however, that the agricul-
tiural produce of the United Kingdom, considered as
one farm, is not very different in value from the
careful estimate which was made some years ago by
Mr. R. H. Rew — viz., £200,000,000. Adding this
to the net industrial output, we get £912,000,000.
We have to add to this sum the imports we re-
ceived in 1907, and to deduct from it the ex-
ports which we sent out of the country in that
year. The whole operation may be shown clearly
thus:

87

THE GREAT STATE

United Kingdom Increment of Material
Wealth iNipoy

Industrial Production :
Net value of output shown
by Census of Production £71 2 ,000,000

Agricultural Production :

Estimated at 200,000,000

Total Material Pro-
duction £912,000,000

Add: Imports into United

Kingdom .£646,000,000

£1,558,000,000

Subtract : (i) Exports of Bri-
tish productions,
£426,000,000
(2) Exports of im-
ported goods,
£92,000,000

£518,000,000

Result: Net gain of Material

Wealth in 1907. . . .£1,040,000,000

Apart from any question as to the quaUty of the
stuff, here is a faithful picture of the wholesale value
of the gain in material commodities which the United
Kingdom made in the year 1907, whether by home

88

WUK.K IN THE GREAT STATE

production or by foreign trade and foreign shipping
and investment. The total, it will be seen, amounts
in round figures to a little more than one thousand
millions. When we remember that in 1907 the
British population numbered 44,000,000, we are
struck, not with the greatness, but with the paucity
of the figtire. It amounts to just over £23 per head
of the population.

Thus, British poverty is not alone a matter of ill-
distribution. If this yearly increment of material
things was equally divided amongst the population,
it would not be sufficient to give good food and
good clothing and good housing, to say nothing of
the materiel of government, of civic life, of sport,
of amusement, and of mental culture, to a popula-
tion of such magnitude. It would abolish poverty
in its worse sense, but it could confer but an exceedingly
poor standard of civilisation.

It will be perceived that the facts we have ex-
amined go much closer to the causes of poverty
than even an investigation of income. The income
of the United Kingdom, defined as the aggregate of
all the wages, salaries, and profits of the individuals
who compose the nation, is about twice as great as
the one thousand million pounds arrived at above.
The national income measures not material incre-
ment alone, but all the services, good, bad, and
indifferent, useful and useless, beneficent and malefi-
cent, which are built up upon the basis of the mate-
rial income. The national income measures not

89

THE GREAT STATE

merely the wage of a useful boiler-maker, but the
salary of a useless clerk, or the fee paid to a lawyer
for making a woman, much more moral than him-
self, confess her failings in the witness-box.

There is, of course, close connection between ill-
distribution and poverty of production, and attention
was specially directed to this in my Riches and
Poverty, Chapter XVIII, p. 251. Here I will only
point out in passing that the ill-distribution of the
national income must connote restriction of material
production, since the rich man, by reason of the
nature of his expenditure, calls out of production
into the region of hand-service and luxury-providing
a considerable number of his fellow-creatures. A
better distribution of income would thus largely
increase material production by changing the char-
acter of expenditure; but much more than that is
needed to abolish material poverty.

SCIENCE HAS SOLVED THE PROBLEM OF PLENTY

No one who is acquainted with modem machine
production can fail to have been struck with the
extreme facility with which we can now fashion
material commodities. The scientist and the en-
gineer have put plenty at our disposal, if we care to
have it. It is not the fault of the inventor or the

90

WORK IN THE GREAT STATE

discoverer that only about 4,000,000 men are irregu-
larly employed upon their wonderful machines and
processes. That is obviously true, for a large pro-
portion of the originators of modem industrial proc-
esses are dead, and their inheritance is the common
property of mankind. Even as to the living in-
ventor, we are careful to put a very short time-Hmit
to his powers of monopoly. The inventor of the
incandescent gas mantle is happily stiU alive; but
any man can now employ cheap labour to turn out
more or less imperfect examples of his great inven-
tion without paying him a cent. There is no secret
about modem machine industry. The great body
of invention is at our disposal with which to produce
plentifukiess, and every year the patents of living
inventors are expiring.

To visit a modem cloth factory or cycle factory or
boot factory or furniture factory is to witness
operations which win from a wonderful complication
of devices, and from a division of labour between
machines made for sectional purposes, an extreme
simplicity and rapidity of output. Each part of a
boot or a cycle, however small and seemingly insig-
nificant, is turned out by a specialised machine at
very small cost. The accurately and beautifully
made parts are put together, and the total labour
exerted to make one boot or one cycle is marvellously
small. Looking at boot machines, we understand
that a very limited number of them, worked by a
small fraction of the working population, could

91

THE GREAT STATE

easily make more boots in a year than our entire
population could wear out in several years. Look-
ing at a cycle factory, we understand that it would
be the simplest possible thing for a very Hmited
number of people to turn out more cycles than there
are people in the country to ride them.

It is not manufacturing which is the trouble to
the manufacturer. It is not the work of his factory
which worries a manufacturer. The manufacturers'
trouble is this, that it is so easy to make things and
so difficult to sell things. It is to selling and not
to making that the manufacturer has chiefly to ad-
dress his mind. From the point of view of economic
production, the man who makes boots is a valuable
worker, while the man who takes orders for boots
and perhaps by his skill in representation takes an
order away from a man who sells better boots,
counts for nothing, or worse than nothing, as an
economic agent. To the manufacturer, however,
the boot worker is a commonplace object who can
easily be replaced, while the successful salesman is
all in all. It is an inversion of proper economic
conceptions which goes to the very root of the
problem of poverty.

The efficient machinery which has been contrived
to meet the needs of large-scale production of every
sort and kind is, as we have seen, worked by a small
proportion of our population. Yet, even when thus
indifferently and partially worked, the machines have
but to keep going for a brief period and demand is

92

WORK IN THE GREAT STATE

overtaken. Almost as soon as the wheels begin to
run freely, the brake must perforce be put to them,
for lack of buyers to command the products which
can so easily be made. The machines are run, not
with the object of producing goods in plenty, but
with the object of reducing costs in connection with
a known or an estimated demand. In effect, every
machine is run to make one thing and one thing
only, and that is individual profit. That profit can
only be secured out of the trade which offers. The
trade which offers arises from the limited consump-
tion of a community, the mass of which are wage-
labourers paid little more than the bare cost of rent-
ing a poor home and buying fuel and food for its
inmates. To run the machines freely under such
conditions is to attempt the impossible. Each
manufacturer, in effect, denies customers to every
other mantifactxxrer. Each is successful in putting
a brake upon the machinery of every other. The
hat-worker cannot afford to buy the boots he re-
quires, which can so easily be made by the boot-
worker. The boot-worker cannot afford to buy the
hats he requires, which can so easily be made by
the hat-worker. Neither of them can command
the cycles so easily turned out at Coventry, and at
Coventry every factory pours out men and women
poorly shod and with indifferent head-gear.

As for the product which is actually turned out,
and supplemented, as we have seen, by exchanges
with foreign parts, it is scrambled for by a host of

93

THE GREAT STATE

uneconomic agents who attenuate the poor stream
of commodities as it flows through the country.

The case of tea, to which I have referred in these
pages, is typical rather than exceptional. To take
retailing alone, the average shopkeeper cannot live
on a gross profit less than from 30 to 50 per cent.
His retail profit may be insignificant, and often is
so. The failures amongst shopkeepers are appalling
in their number. But whether they succeed or
fail, upon every article they sell they must load on
a big gross profit. When, therefore, the wage-
earner takes his poor wage to market, he has first
of all to provide a living for middlemen whose Uving
may be as hard to get as his own, while both suffer
from the waste of their labour.

There is one certain way of getting very little out
of the scramble, and that is to be one of the producers.
So long as a man is content to remain a useful
economic producer he cannot become even moder-
ately comfortable. If he is worldly wise, he will
reason to himself: "There is only one way in which
I can get a chance to make an ample subsistence,
and that is by ceasing to make goods, and by entering
upon one of the paths by which I can make, not
goods, but profits." "Getting on" is rarely or
never possible for the man who continues honestly
to make hats or furniture or boots or carpets or
upholstery, as a unit in large-scale economic pro-
duction. Can we wonder, then, if an increasingly
large proportion of the population has reaUsed this

94

WORK IN THE GREAT STATE

and has made what is, iinder the circtanstances,
the wise decision to desert production for one of
the paths of profit? When there is neither comfort
nor honour to be got out of honest work, need we wonder
if so many of us prefer to live without working? The
latter course is at least not less likely to fail than the
former and offers so many sublime opportunities.

So it is that the inventors, the scientists, and the
engineers have completely failed to make tolerable
the lot of the common man. It was in 1828 that
George Stephenson ran "The Rocket"; to-day,
eighty years after, the great mass of the British
people are unable to travel any considerable dis-
tance in their own coimtry by railway, for they can-
not afford the fares. The steamship is nearly as
old as the railway locomotive; yet to-day the masses
are only acquainted with steamships when they are
driven into emigration. We possess in electric trac-
tion the means of spreading our town populations
over considerable and healthy areas; the people
remain, huddled in their grimy towns, a prey to
disease. We are one of the few great coal nations;
yet few of our people can afford to warm their
houses properly. The mass of the British people
warm their beds with their own bodies, and that in a
great coal country which enjoys seven months of
winter. We have not yet the wit to keep us warm.
Vain have been the strivings of the most gifted of
men. The machines they have constructed have but
created a new race of machine-slaves, and made it

95

THE GREAT_ STATE

possible for an increasing proportion of civilised men
to live by useless work, while liberating entirely from
work, useful or useless, a limited leisure class which
alone enjoys the fruits of the earth as multiplied and
harvested by machinery.

Is it necessary for so much work to produce so
much pain ? After taking so much trouble to facili-
tate production, does it pass the wit of man to
organise our labour to better advantage than is
shown in the wretched material increment we have
examined, made to be enjoyed chiefly by those who
do not produce it? Is it really more difficult to
persuade a people to use machinery properly than
it is to invent the machinery itself? Must it be
said of civiHsed man that he can analyse the light of
Sirius but cannot shelter all his children? — that he
can achieve scientific miracles but is baffled by the
commonplace ?

VI
THE STATE ORGANISED FOR WORK.

The answer to the questions just propounded is
that, while scientific accomplishment has in the last
few generations been regarded as a proper study of
mankind, we have not yet deemed it our duty to
provide our people with comfort. As long as science
was a forbidden domain, science made little prog-
ress. As long as men continue to regard such a

96

WORK IN THE GREAT STATE

thing as an ample supply of clothing a matter to be
resigned to haphazard effort, conducted by unor-
ganised and incompletely informed individuals work-
ing in opposition to each other for private gain, the
masses of people will remain ill-dad. That is as
true as what Machiavelli long ago wrote as to the
impossibility of conducting successful national mili-
tary operations by purchasing the services of con-
dottieri. No nation will ever be well housed, well
clothed, well fed, and well cultured while it is
content to cherish industrial condottieri. Not un-
til the soldier of fortune is as much an anachronism
in the industrial as in the military world will there
be an output of commodities of such dimensions as
to abolish material poverty, and of such rapidity
and ease of production as to abolish the distinction
between classes by creating a universal leisure won
through the ordered scientific use of economic
appliances.

Is this to envisage as a worthy ideal a Great
State running as a Great Machine, the well-oiled
wheels of which are the lives and labours of drilled
and enslaved citizens? Does the reign of Order
necessarily mean the loss of liberty, of individuality,
of personal choice, of captaincy of one's own soul?

The answer to these questions will appear to those
who consider carefully the considerations which
have been advanced in these pages. Production
has become so simple that, if a people will but
consent to organise for the production necessary to

97 H

THE GREAT STATE

yield a high minimum standard of subsistence for
the entire community, the necessary labour wUl
occupy so small a proportion of the day of the
community's adtdts of working age, as to produce
for every one such a measure of liberty as can now
be enjoyed in dishonourable ease by but a few. I
have led up to this proposition by showing (i) that
present production is the work of a few, (2) that
the work of even that few is largely wasted, and
(3) that the means of production are now so efficient
as to make it possible to produce easily much more
than we can possibly consume.

In our community of some forty-five millions of
people, there are approaching twenty-eight millions
over eighteen years of age. It is clear, then, that if
training merged into economic work at eighteen, the
number of workers would be so great as to make it
possible to organise, in a very brief working day for
all, the efficient production and distribution of the
materials necessary for a high minimum standard of
living. If a few millions of men, aided by a miUion or
two of women, boys, and girls, can create and sustain
the material fabric we now know of, in spite of the in-
terruption of unemployment, preventable sickness,
and avoidable accident, what could not be done by
the entire nation, engaged in economic laboiur, and
working with the aid of the most efficient appliances
ui each department of production ? One cannot pre-
tend to make estimates in such a matter, but I submit
with confidence that an ample output in all the de-

98

WORK IN THE GREAT STATE

parttnents of civic, home, road, and transport mainte-
nance, construction and repair, of lighting and heat-
ing, of cloths and apparel, of foods and beverages,
of indoor and outdoor furnishings, of afforestation
and land development, of certain public amusements
and exhibitions, could be secured in a short working
day, leaving the greater part of the life of an adult
absolutely free, within the limits of common rule,
for the pursuit of individual occupations, researches,
travels, and amusements, the leisure dignified and
justified by the ordered maximum of labour, and
the necessary labours of the Commonwealth de-
prived of monotony and hardship by the gain of
honourable leisure.

But let us endeavour to get definite conceptions
of the possibilities of necessary order and admired
disorder, of organised work and unorganised work,
of law and of liberty, of professionalism and of
amatetuism, in this Great State that we dare to
dream of.

At the age of, say, eighteen years the youth will
pass into apprenticeship to some definite branch
of the organised work of the Great State. It is not
my province here to deal with the education which
will fit him for serious professional service. Basing
myself upon the known fact that an average child,
given proper training, is the inheritor of the normal
capacity of his race, and can be developed into a
man useful to himself and to his fellows, I postulate
an education worthy the name. I see the average

99

THE GREAT STATE

boy of eighteen, not only healthy, but understanding
why he is healthy, and what branches of the pro-
fessional work of the State are necessary for the
maintenance of that public health in which he
shares. I see him thus respecting his own body
and the bodies of others. His eye is clear, and his
touch is deft and firm. He moves with grace and
precision, and his hands are skilful. In the region
of acquired knowledge, as distinguished from the
education of his inherited powers, he is acquainted
with the elements of science. He knows the quality
of the Nature from which he has emerged, so far as
it has been revealed by the sciences of geology,
biology, chemistry, and physics. He has taken up
the magnificent inheritance of knowledge which
as yet not one in ten thousand of our people enjoys.
By virtue of this inheritance, he understands the
physical world in which he has his being. For him
there are sermons in stones, and good and evil in
everything. He rejoices in his knowledge as he
rejoices in his strength. His acquaintance with
first principles enables him to scan a machine with
an eye of intelligence. There is no common object
of that conquest of Nature which we call Civih-
sation which has mystery for him. He, therefore,
understands why work is necessary, and why
Nature has not merely to be conquered in one
final decisive battle, but in the every day of a never-
ending struggle. What imagination he has and
what native powers he possesses are widened and

lOO

WORK IN THE GREAT STATE

deepened and multiplied by the knowledge which
makes him one of the chain of Nature's conquerors.
Withal, he has read in the history of the races of
man and in the Hterature and philosophy which
has been the expression of the best of men; and the
structure of society and the manner of the governance
of society are known to him in their forms and in
their conceptions.

Thus I see the normal educated youth of the
Great State, and I cannot see a Great State based
on anything less. Without general culture of a
kind which is not now possessed even by our ruling
classes, I can see nothing more than the possi-
bility of a Socialist bureaucracy, a Servile State,
a later Peruvian SociaHsm, with its general order
of docile units and its upper order of a ruling and
informed caste. I do not deny that a socialistic
bureaucratic State might be infinitely superior to
our existing admixture of bureaucracy, feudalism,
and private individual governance for purposes of
individual gain; but let us build as greatly as scien-
tific attainment gives us leave to envisage the future,
trusting that we may be really building even greater
still.

I picture the educated youth of eighteen choosing
his professional lot.

It is necessary here to interpolate the supposi-
tion that the Great State will express the results
of the professional work done within its borders —
tha results, that is, of that maximum of individual

lOI

THE GREAT STATE

labour which its citizens will owe it — ^in money,
and that the income, or share of the results of pro-
fessional work, which all will enjoy, will be spent
in the form of money by citizens free to command
with that money whatsoever the Great State
produces.

A call for commodities being a call for labour, the
Great State will be able to measure unerringly for
what, kind of labour the people call. It will also
know what quantity of human work, aided by the
most economic appliances known, is needed in each
department of production called upon by the people's
aggregate expenditure. Thus, in any partictdar
year, as the youth of the nation reaches the age of
entry into professional labour, a certain number
of apprenticeships or openings wiU be available for
the new workers of the year. It is not difficult to
conceive arrangements, combining elements of choice
with elements of examination as to qualifications,
which shall draft the youth of the year into the
professional work of the nation. The average
element of choice will be a thousandfold wider than
now, and liberty in this respect thus a thousand-
fold wider. For all but an insignificant fraction of
the youth of our State that is, there is in practice
no choice, and, even where choice exists, it is but
as a choice of evils. Narrow indeed is the gate, and
strait exceedingly is the way, for the son of a Gla-
morganshire miner or of a London bricklayer or
of a Leicester boot-hand who reaches the thirteen

I02

WORK IN THE GREAT STATE

years of age at which he is ejected from the sham
schools wherein we mock the name of Education.

And this enlarged liberty in choosing the way of
professional life, it must be remembered, although
necessarily finding bounds to its freedom in the
necessities of society and the limitations of the
individual, is, it is necessary to insist, but the com-
mittal of the individual to that part of his life which
is to be professional. True it is that this side of life
must have its limitations to freedom, its elements of
compulsion, its inexorable call to duty, and its door
shut against escape from honourable toil. But this
side of man's life will not necessarily be the larger
side. Every professional of the Great State will be
also an amateur of what arts, what occupations he
chooses.

Again let us remember that in our forty-five
millions of people there are twenty-eight millions
of over eighteen years of age. What might not
twenty-six million persons — to deduct the two
million over sixty-five years of age — do even to-day,
with science and invention no more developed than
they are, if their labour was organised without com-
petitive waste and exerted, not for individual profit,
but in the output and economic distribution of useful
products and services?

The conception of the Great State is that the
whole of the adult population will be organised to
produce a minimum standard of life, expressed by
the output and distribution of the material products

103

THE GREAT STATE

and services necessary to its maintenance. This
work is what I term the professional life of the in-
dividual. It is the performance of his social duty.
It is a thing of written law and compulsion. And
because it is universal and compulsory, and be-
cause the waste of effort will be reduced to an in-
significance, the professional or compulsory work
of the individual will occupy but a few hours of his
day. Even now, were the thing possible, as most
unhappily it is not possible, the adult units of our
people, officered by the small proportion of informed
people we possess, could probably do all that is now
usefully done in not more than a five hours' day.
With a universal scientific education, less than a
five hours' day of labour for adults will produce a
bulk of commodities and services many times
greater than now obtains.

The economic contraction of professional life means
the widening of freedom. Beyond his professional
work, the citizen will owe no duty to the State, and
he will be free to do anything which is not to the
injtiry of his fellows. For the greater part of his
working hours, that is, he may be poet or painter,
writer or philosopher, singer or musician, actor or
dramatist, carver or sculptor, even sportsman or
idler.

I cannot conceive a professional actor in the Great
State; I can only see amateur actors, robbed of
those unfortunate attributes that come with eternal
pose, by healthy work done in a healthy world.

104

WORK IN THE GREAT STATE

I cannot imagine a poet selling his epics in the Great
State; I can only see amateur poets, whose Muses
shall visit them the more frequently because they
are engaged in the useful work of the world. I
cannot conceive in the Great State would-be pro-
fessional painters ruined by drink and the devil
.while waiting for rich parvenus to appreciate their
Venuses ; I can only see healthy creatures painting
because they needs must, and painting what they
want to paint. As for the great army of writers,
journalists, ministers of religion of all denomina-
tions, dancers, philosophers, lecturers, and others
who now escape from legitimate labour, and from
their honest share of what needs to be done that we
all may live, sometimes escaping because they are
clever, sometimes because they are merely artful, and
sometimes, Heaven knows how, when they are
neither clever nor artful, there will be no room for
them as professionals in the Great State. They may
write for such as will read ; they may mime for such as
will look ; they may lecture for such as will hear ; they
may preach to such congregations as their gifts
may command; but they will do so as amateurs,
and their labour of love will find its reward in that
self-respect and public honour which are amongst
the chief rewards possible for man.

Thus I picture an amateur life of individual work
and recreation embroidered upon the main social fabric
formed by exertion in professional work.

The amateur side of life in the Great State will

THE GREAT STATE

need its materials. Those materials will be partly-
purchased with money out of State production
through the individual's ordinary income which
expresses his minimum wage, and partly supplied
by amateur effort and exchanges between amateurs
as amateurs. This side of the subject presents no
difficulty. We can see the amateur carver working
upon wood the produce of State professional pro-
duction. We can see the amateur company of actors
hiring one of the Great State's theatres, and per-
forming with dresses and effects partly pvirchased
out of income from State stores and partly fur-
nished by amateur effort or by amateur elabora-
tion or decoration of State materials. The poet's
pen and ink, the artist's tools and colours, the
amateur pubHshers' paper and machinery, will ail
alike be commanded out of State production by
professional income and elaborated or worked with
in amateurs' time.

The newspaper of the Great State will be a plain
record of home and foreign happenings. It will
record the result of elections at home and abroad,
the progress of industries, the growth or decline of
peoples, the judgments in cases of dispute or arbi-
tration, the births and marriages and deaths, the
departures of travellers, the arrival of visitors, the
accidents or misfortimes in its homes and factories.
It will not record opinions, or be concerned with
policies. Organs of opinion will be purely amateur
in ownership and direction. An organ of opinion

io6

WORK IN THE GREAT STATE

will not be published for gain, but to express the
thoughts and desires of those who publish it. Ob-
viously, they will not desire to publish unless they
think earnestly and strongly, and for a man or
society of men who think thus it will be easy to
publish. (As I need hardly point out, there is al-
ready growing up a very great output of purely ama-
teur and non-commercial literature of opinion, in the
shape of books, pamphlets, reports, journals, etc.)
The professional income of twenty men, or even ten,
will command paper and machinery, and by their
own amateur labour men will ^ speak their minds.
If such speaking gains hearers, it will gain supporters,
and a large circulation will be possible — not a circu-
lation contracted for with advertisers, or a circula-
tion which needs must be to give so many people a
Hving whether they want to write or not, or whether
they have anything to say or not. Thus the organs
of opinoin of the Great State will live honestly or
not at all, and even the least of poetasters will find
it less difficult than now to produce his little volume
of verses for the edification of his friends.

I see that in some ways the professional and ama-
teur worker of the Great State will join hands.
"It is my pleasure," said the German municipal
architect to me, as he waved his hand towards the
municipal dwellings. I see arn£C3ur painters com-
peting for the pleasure of decc^Ling with frescoes
the panels of a new Town Hall, amateur painters
who professionally may be carpenters or clerks

107

THE GREAT STATE

or masons or engineers, and who, assured of an
ample income by their professional labour, will aim
at the honour of making their own monument in
amateur work done for their own joy and for the
public good. I see no reason to suppose that the
professional workers of the Great State will not be as
ready to sacrifice their lives, if need be, as some
amongst out leisure classes are ready to-day. The
amateurs of the Great State will be the labour class, and
the professionals of the Great State will be the leisure
class, and all these will he one. I have faith that there
is that in man which will build greatly on this con-
ception, and I see no reason to set limits to the
strivings of man under such conditions.

It is possible that for long, if not for ever, there
will remain many tasks necessary to civilisation
which will call for unusual physical exertion, or
the suffering of unpleasant physical conditions, or
even the risk of danger. For example, we do not
know for how long the world will be dependent upon
coal for its supplies of energy. Let us suppose that
the Great State will be so dependent. Does the
supply of labour for such work present difficulties?
The answer is that labour of this kind will be done
in the Great State by sharing it amongst the able-
bodied. The Great State will regard it as a thing
impossible to condemn a man to be a coal-miner
for life. For my own part, I always regard the de-
votion of a definite section of our people to mining
as a sentence of penal servitude upon them. It goes

io8

WORK IN THE GREAT STATE

without saying that the Great State, if it uses coal,
will conserve it, so that coal-mining will be reduced
to a minimum. That minimum will be performed,
not by a definite few for life, but by all able-bodied
men for a year or two. Mining is much more danger-
ous than soldiering, and calls for the application of
the principle of conscription. The mining conscript
will go to his term of service as a matter of duty and
with pride. In after years he will look back upon
his Mining Year, and because of it he will the better
understand the society in which he lives and the
relation of labour to life.

Such a plan will avoid the cruelty and the waste
of setting a definite million, or a definite half-million
— for that is what we now do in effect — to do a
particularly hard and dangerous form of work. We
cannot afford to bury in a coal-mine without chance
of redemption lives of we know not what possibilities.
We cannot give every man adequate opportunity
unless we give every man more than the prospect
of unending toil in a single groove, and unless we
provide every man with leisure.

Individual saving will be both unnecessary and
unknown in the Great State, and the form of saving
known as insurance, necessary as it is to-day, will be
read of in history with considerable amusement.
What capital saving is necessary will, of course, be
done out of the product of the State's professional
work, and the only waste in connection with this
capital saving will be the devotion of a certain

109

THE GREAT STATE

amount of labour to experiment in every branch of
production, although amateur experiment will be
plentiful, because of the fulness of opportunity for
the prosecution of individual tastes and inclinations
in the arts and sciences. The devotion of the pro-
fessional work of the State to the best materials and
in the best way will, of course, reduce the need for
labour upon capital work, since replacements and
repairs will be less needed on account of wear and tear.
No vested interests wUl impede the substitution of
one process for another, or of a better for a worse
invention.

As need hardly be added, there will be a tremen-
dous increase of really personal property in the Great
State, and nothing will prevent the bequeathing
or the inheritance of such personal property. Ob-
viously, however, a man wiU not burden himself
with more personal property than he can care for,
and he wUl be quite unable to command menials
to take charge of an excess. Thus personal prop-
perty will naturally limit itself to those really per-
sonal implements, ornaments, furnishings, garments,
books, musical instruments, etc., which pertain to
the needs, habits, and tastes of the individual. The
means of producing professional income will belong
to the Great State, and no private individual will,
therefore, be able to control the work of his fellows.
He will be able to get amateur service from a friend;
he will have no economic lien upon any man. The
citizens of the Great State will be amused when they

no

WORK IN THE GREAT STATE

recall days when men possessed bits of paper repre-
senting a fraction of a municipal sewer, or of a rail-
way line, or of a colliery plant, or of a calico shed, or
even of a druggist's shop, and when, by virtue of
such ownership, a man could live without continuing
to labour. No ; interest wiU not exist in the Great
State, but every man wiU realise before he passes into
the work of the world that he is one of the nation's
common inheritor's, and that it will be his personal
interest, as it is not now, to swell the value of the
common undertaking: — ^to increase what will be
really and not nominally a National Dividend.

The mutation of industrial processes in the Great
State will be an exceedingly simple matter. To-day,
the man who invented a method of building houses
with one-half the present amount of labour would
condemn to ruin, and in many cases to utter destitu-
tion and degradation, hulidreds of thousands of
families in every industrial nation, and the economic
effects wovdd not pass until tens of thousands of
heads had been plunged tmder water. Indeed,
tmder present conditions it is a mercy when dulness
of perception or lack of enterprise of capitalists
keeps a new process hanging fire for some years.
In the Great State the invention of a process to
halve the labour in a great branch of national in-
dustry will mean simply the reduction of the work-
ing day of the citizen as professional without the
reduction of his income, and the pro tanto increase
of his leisure as amateur. Thus, every new invention

THE GREAT STATE

will be hailed joyfully as meaning either the decrease
of work with the same income, or a larger income
for the same amount of work. Let that be under-
stood in a community of educated people, and the
spur to invention will take us to means of accom-
plishment as yet undreamed of.

For the woman the Great State spells Economic
Independence and the end of marriage as a profes-
sion. The marriages of the Great State will be be-
tween economic equals, and only maternity will
release a woman from her professional duty. Mother-
hood, of course, will be the peculiar care of the Great
State, and for a certain number of years the mother
will draw her professional income as mother, in ad-
dition to an endowment for each child, and the child
will be in no sense dependent upon the work of its
father. I see the budding girl's education in the
Great State regardful of her supreme function, and
the training and nurture of the child regarded as
the professional duty of a woman both before and
for some time after the beginning of the age when it
will begin systematic training in the school. Thus,
some ten or fifteen years of the life of most adtilt
women will be divorced from the professional material
work of the State, but before the beginning and
after the end of that period the adult woman will
work at the profession into, which she has been in-
ducted in the manner we have already indicated.

It is not necessary, at the end of the first decade
of the twentieth century, to say very much by way

112

WORK IN THE GREAT STATE

of argument that it is possible for the major in-
dustries of a nation to be unified and placed under
State controls. Some forty years ago John Stuart
Mill wrote that "The very idea of conducting the
whole industry of a country by direction from' a
single centre is so obviously chimerical that no-
body ventures to propose any mode in which it
should be done." Since those words were written
it has been, proved abundantly that large-scale
operations conducted under the general direction of
a central control are not merely possible, but pos-
sess such advantages in practice that business men
have been led to consolidate trade after trade in all
the great industrial nations, and especially in the
country America, which, by reason of the magni-
tude of her population and natural resources, pre-
sents the largest factors to deal with. Thus the
United States Steel Corporation, which is a private
"State within the State," is a far larger industrial
undertaking than would be formed if all the iron
and steel works, including the iron-mines, of the
United Kingdom were unified under a single public
direction.

The truth is that the economic consolidation of
all the factors of an industry in the State eliminates
difficulties instead of creating them, as was supposed
by the older economists. Thus, if we take the very
fainiliar case of the Post Office, the ease with which
its operations are conducted is often attributed to
the inherent simplicity of the trade. As a matter

113 I

THE GREAT STATE

of fact, the business of collecting, transmitting,
and delivering letters is one which, if it were not
organised as a single unit, would be one of infinite
difficulty and complexity. Imagine it organised
under the direction of some hundreds of partly com-
petitive, partly monopolistic, local or district letter-
delivery firms, each necessarily having accounts
with each other, and the jurisdiction of each running
no farther than a certain limit, more or less wide,
and sometimes overlapping with the area of opera-
tions of a competitor. Imagine, then, the postal
communications of an unfortunate people collected
by some one firm, transmitted through several others,
and finally delivered (or not delivered) by a com-
pany in the district of the addressee. Imagine the
charges piled up to pay the host of unnecessary
between-agents, the vexatious delays that would
arise, the consequent restriction of postal facilities
and slow growth of communication. With such an
economic absurdity in being, we can imagine a
second John Stuart Mill gravely pointing out in
an economic treatise that such a complicated, such
an inherently difficult, such a vexatious trade could
never be sucessfuUy carried on by a State depart-
ment. But this picture of a disintegrated postal
service does not tell one-fiftieth part of the every-
day absurdities of our organisation for the dis-
tribution of groceries or meat or dairy produce or
vegetables. In these, we tolerate the waste of
hundreds of millions a year in setting milUons of

114

WORK IN THE GREAT STATE

men and women to waste their time as unneces-
sary, and often unhappy and overworked between-
agents, who earn mean and paltry livings while
simply serving to attenuate the streams of com-
modities which under happier conditions they might
swell. In the distribution of coal, for example,
we have in practice a case much more wasteful than
we have imagined if private were substituted for
public letter-carrying. It is a case not merely of
separate controls in each area, but of insane com-
petition in each area between middle-men whose
expenses are necessarily great, and whose ex-
penses, from invoice forms to advertisements, have
each and all to be paid for by the consumer in the
final price of coal. So it falls out that often the
consumer of coal pays a high price for the fuel even
while the hewer of coal is obtaining a mere trifle
for getting it. The mining of coal by the State and
its distribution through local authorities as agents
would, on the other hand, with an organisation
much simpler than that of the Post Office, put coal
at a nation's disposal cheaply and conveniently and
with complete guarantee as to grade and suitability
for specific use. >^

And so it is with each of the industries wljich con-
tribute to what ought to be the comforts of civili-
sation but in practice are the comforts of a few
bought by the largely wasted labour of the comfort-
less many. To write a plain and unvarnished ac-
count of what happens to the milk produced in the

"5

THE GREAT STATE

United Kingdom, or to the tea landed in the United
Kingdom, or to the wool imported into the United
Kingdom, is to describe a series of absurdly com-
plicated and wasteful operations which in great
part are as economically useless as to set men to dig
holes and to fill them up again. For example, Colo-
nial wool imported into Britain is chiefly used in
Yorkshire, but the greater part of it is childishly
landed, not at Hull or Goole, but in London, where
it is played pranks with by hosts of railway compa-
nies, carriers, warehousemen, brokers, auctioneers, etc.
After having been played with, and pro tanto raised
in price, it is gravely conveyed, again by competi-
tive railway companies and carriers, to the worsted
and woollen industries in Yorkshire. But this is to
imagine no waste prior to the ridiculous landing
at a port hundreds of miles from the place where
the material is wanted. When we remember that
in Australasia similar absurdities occur and similar
uneconomic "livelihoods" are made out of the
product by the wasted work of thousands, we have a
picture of waste from start to finish which gravely
reflects upon the competence of mankind. There is,
of course, no need for such complications. The
Great State of Australia could transmit its wool
simply and surely to a wool-consuming land like the
United Kingdom; here the wool department of the
British Great State would obviously see that the
wool was landed at the nearest port to its place
of use. Not a broker, not an agent, not an auc-

ii6

WORK IN THE GREAT STATE

tioneer would be needed; the number of necessary-
carriers and distributors would be few through the
simplicity of direction; the worsted and woollen
industries would get their raw material cheaply and
at last honestly, and thousands of men would be set
free from work upon waste to do the economic work
for lack of which we remain poor.

It is impossible to multiply details in so broad a
sketch as this, but something may usefuUy be said
with regard to the simplification of exportation and
importation. A hint of the possible improvement of
facilities which would arise between nations properly
organised for work is also to be found in existing
postal arrangements. The ease and certainty with
which postal communications are exchanged be-
tween nations have become a commonplace; but,
regarded in relation to the great majority of inter-
national dealings, they are miraculous. The eco-
nomic reasons for interchanges between geographical
areas would remain in a world of federated Great
States; all that would be removed would be the
main difficulties which now impede exchange. No
longer should we witness such sad spectacles as the
holding-up of- raw cotton by one set of agents in
America to retard the progress of the very cotton-
manufacturing industry upon the success of which
the real gain of a cotton-planter natiirally depends,
or of the Brazilian government arranging for the
solemn burning or holding-up of a fine harvest of
coffee even while millions in the world have not

117

THE GREAT STATE

coffee enough. Nor is it difficult to realise how, in
a world organised for economic labour under the
captaincy of Great States, all the factors of the
great industries throughout the world could be co-
ordinated, from the production of the primary-
materials to the distribution of the finished articles,
effecting a proper relation between the producer-
consumer and the consumer-producer, making every
man a citizen of the world and giving all the world
to each man's use.

Such are the hopes which man can legitimately
cherish for the control of the Nature from which he
has emerged in this one of the least of Nature's
worlds. It is a control which cannot be exercised
effectively without co-operative effort and proper
organisation for work. The struggle with Nature
differentiates man from the other animals, and is
his hope of redemption from a natiural poverty. The
struggle is too stern for us to be able to afford to
turn from it to spend most of our time in putting
forth useless competitive work. The little world
to which we are confined is too poor to yield more
than poverty for the many while the many are
stupidly scraping together a Uttle for the few to
enjoy. It is not a world of plenty, such as is often
pictured by sentimentalists, in which Nature is
bountiful and men naturally wealthy. It is a world
of pain, in which a grim Nature stalks relentless,
red of tooth and claw; a world so limited in re-
sources that, until modem science had given us

ii8

WORK IN THE GREAT STATE

some degree of mastery, the majority of men were
necessarily poor. To-day, with the endowment of
Science at our disposal, we know how to win plenty
from an unwilling world. We know how; but, even
while we know, we neglect to put our hands to the
necessary labour. To organise for work thus be-
comes the primary duty of our modern civilisations,
and organisation for work is Socialism. A State of
iU-informed but drilled servile units, under the
guidance of a specialised bureaucracy, could doubt-
less do effective work and abolish poverty as we
know it to-day, but it would not be the Great State
of our desire. The Great State can only be a nation
of free men, educated to the full development and
accentuation of their inherent inequalities, equal in
point of economic independence and opportunity,
understanding the necessity of continuous and un-
remitting labour, and, therefore, organised for work
as the only means of escape from unnecessary toil.

THE MAKING OF NEW KNOWLEDGE

BY SIR RAY LANKESTER, K.C.B., F.R.S.

IV
THE MAKING OF NEW KNOWLEDGE

It is perhaps necessary before considering how
this ideal Great State, which is the common basis
of all these essays, may best provide for the making
of new knowledge, to discuss the question as to how
the present or the future rulers of the State are to
be brought to such an appreciation of the meaning
of new knowledge — ^new science, whether of extra-
human nature or of man's own nature, history,
and capacities — as to understand that it is the one
factor upon which the happiness and healthy de-
velopment of mankind depend. I leave this pre-
liminary discussion the more willingly to other
writers, since I confess that after spending the best
part of my energies during nearly fifty years in
endeavouring to increase the number of my fellow-
citizens who have arrived at a just estimate of the
value of new knowledge and of the consequent need
for the organisation of its pursuit by the expendi-
ture of public funds, I am disappointed with the
result.

There has been a little, but a very little progress.
The mass of the pubHc, both those who should know

123

THE GREAT STATE

better and those who cannot be expected to, have
persistently confused the, teaching of the elements of
existing science with what is a very different thing —
namely, the search for new science, the actual crea-
tion of knowledge which is not merely new to the
ignorant, but new to the most advanced and capable
investigators. It has been the rule that all effort
and apparent success in securing and organising
means for the creation of new knowledge are sooner
or later misappropriated by those who are bent upon
teaching what is already known. Throughout the
country the holders of both old and new professor-
ships, in both ancient and modern universities, have
been remorselessly compelled to perform the work
of schoolmasters and examination-grinders, and as a
rule for less pay than is received by the latter. The
attempt to make the university professor an investi-
gator and creator of new knowledge (in accordance
with the dictum of Fichte ^) has failed in consequence
of the overwhelming number of those who are able
to exercise control in the details of these matters and
have either no conception of what creation of new
knowledge means or else have deliberately deter-
mined that it shall not go on and that all the re-
sources of our universities and all the strength of

' Fichte, in his essay on ' ' The University to be Founded in Berlin,"
says that a university is not a place where instruction is given, but
an institution for the training of experts in the art of making knowl-
edge, and that this end is attained by the association of the pupil
with his professor in the inquiries which the latter initiates and
pursues.

124

THE MAKING OF NEW KNOWLEDGE

their promising young men shall be used in the task
of preparing indifferent youths to pass examinations.

It is perhaps natural that the unqualified persons
who, as committees and councils and congregations,
are allowed to control the expenditure of university
endowments should so frequently destroy the oppor-
tunity which those endowments naturally afford and
were intended to afford — to the men who are capable
of creating new knowledge. These managers and
controllers honestly confuse the teaching of the
elements of science with the making of new knowl-
edge.' They do not know either that this making
of new knowledge is of prime importance to the well-
being of the State, nor that, when looked at from the
point of view of higher education, there is no in-
fluence, no training, no development so important
and so entirely without possible substitute, as that
arising from the association of younger men in re-
search and investigation with an older gifted and
authoritative investigator who makes them co-
workers with him in some great line of inquiry.

Not only do we suffer in this country from the fact
that the control of higher educational institutions is

' I read to-day in the Times the self-congratulation of the Ox-
ford tutors and lecturers, who have given up a large part of their
long (very long) vacation to teaching working-class men and
women whom they have induced to come to Oxford and take
lessons from them. It is declared that "the respect for knowledge "
(whose?) and the eagerness to acquire it shown by the working-class
people was most gratifying. Leaving aside the question as to the
value of these studies, it is regrettable that the money and re-
sources of a university should be thus dissipated.

I2S

THE GREAT STATE

in incapable hands, but it is the fact that no leader in
the State ever shows any sympathy with discovery or
takes any step to promote its increase. In Germany,
where already every university is mainly organised
as a series of institutes of scientific research and dis-
covery, the Emperor, at the centenary of the Uni-
versity of Berhn, declared that he desired to see
there more institutions for pure research, whose
directors should be untrammelled by the demands
of ordinary teaching. After a truly admirable ac-
count of the splendid work done by the University
of Berlin in the regeneration of the fatherland, he
himself did something the like of which no prince
or statesman has done in Great Britain since the
time of Henry VIII. : he handed over to the
university (which already has an income of £140,000
a year) a vast sum of money — half a milUon pounds
sterling — for the creation there of institutes of scien-
tific research; and he pledged himself that this was
only a provision for initial expenditure and that
the Imperial government would find fiu-ther money
for the support and development of these institu-
tions so set on foot.

What I feel is that, in spite of all that has been
said and done in the last fifty years, no one in Great
Brita:in would dream of expecting such a provision
to be made for scientific research in London as that
recently made by the German Emperor in Berlin.
It seems to me that the present British governing
class, whether they label themselves with one political

126

THE MAKING OF NEW KNOWLEDGE

name or another, cannot be imagined as acting in
the spirit of the Emperor William. If they were
told of what he has done in this matter, they would
not beUeve it. They have not arrived at the first
step in conceiving of the possibility of such ex-
penditure — expenditure not to teach and train pro-
fessional engineers, chemists, or doctors (that is a
thing our politicians might understand, though not
approve), but expenditure for the sole purpose of
creating new knowledge, knowledge pure and simple,
not as the so-called "handmaid" of commerce,
industry, and the arts of war, but knowledge as the
greatest and best thing that man can create —
knowledge as the Master who must be obeyed.

And whilst I feel something like despair in regard
to the appreciation of knowledge by our present
form of government and state organisation which is
far advanced along the line of the progressive
"Culte de 1' Incompetence" so firmly traced by M.
Faguet,^ of the Academie Frangaise, I find no reason
to hope that, when the democracy has, in this coun-
try, gained more complete power, there will be any
change for the better. At present the "masses " are,
if possible, more ignorant of the meaning of science
and the need for making new science, new knowledge,
than are the "classes." As I have said, I must leave
it to others amongst my fellow-essayists to suggest
how or when the toiling millions of the British Em-
pire or of all civilised Europe, Asia, and America

' See his book with that title.
127

THE GREAT STATE

together, are going to arrive at, first of all, an under-
standing of what the "progress of science" really
means and what it does not mean, as distinguished
from mere pedagogic instruction, and, secondly, at
such a desire for that progress as will lead them to
sanction the annual expenditure, out of public re-
sources, on the making of new knowledge, of as large
a sum as we now spend annually on the army and
navy.

Supposing that very large sums were available in
the new Great State for devotion to the business
of making new knowledge, what would be probably
the best way or the most promising way in which
such money could be spent ? What sort of an organi-
sation would be required ? I will venture to indulge
in a speculative consideration of this remote but at
the same time interesting problem.

It seems to me that what we who believe in the
vital importance of the making of new knowledge
must aim at is, in the first place, the selection by the
State of really great and specially gifted investigators
or makers of new knowledge, in such number as
lavish provision of stipend and means of research can
seciure, as ' ' servants of the State. ' ' Secondly, we must
aim at the selection of a regular succession of young
men who have the gift or talent of discovery of new
knowledge, to be associated with the older men in
their work and in the course of time to succeed to
the positions held by the older men.

128

THE MAKING OF NEW KNOWLEDGE

Let me at once say that it seems to be quite certain
that the special mental quality which enables its
possessor to discover new things, to make new knowl-
edge of nature and of man, is not a common one.
Probably many youths have it in a greater or less de-
gree, and may be trained or encouraged so as to
develop it. But the possession of it in a marked
degree so as to make it worth while to secure the ser-
vices of the possessor for a career of investigation is
extremely rare. That is a reason why every care
should be taken to discover those who possess it and
to enable them to exercise their capacity. There is
no reason to suppose that the quality of mind we look
for is not as abundantly distributed among the poorer
classes as among the well-to-do. The State must
cast its net widely so as to include the whole popu-
lation without distinction of class or sex. But the
essence of success lies in wise and honest selection
directed to this one quality or gift. How can such a
selection be effected?

It seems to me that the necessary first step must be
the creation of a limited number of institutes of
research in specific subjects such as are recognised
to-day (and may be further divided and rearranged
hereafter) imder the names, Astronomy, Mathemat-
ics, Physics (several). Chemistry (several). Geology,
Zoology, Botany, Physiology, Pathology, Anthro-
pology, Psychology, Archaeology (several), Oceanog-
raphy, and so on. Necessarily the provision for each
branch of these subjects would at first be incomplete,

129 K

THE GREAT STATE

but the number would have to be increased rapidly-
after the first institutes were created, and from the
first it would be laid down that no institute was ex-
pected to carry on work in more than a limited por-
tion of the subjects indicated by its title.

For each of these institutes — which would at first
be situated in London, but would be multiplied in
number and established in every large centre of popu-
lation in the course of time — a director or chief inves-
tigator would have to be chosen by the officials of the
State. This would be the most critical step in the
whole scheme, since the entire futtu-e success not only
of each institute, but of the whole body of institutes,
must be affected by this first selection. The avowed
and unalterable purpose of the officials who make this
selection must be to obtain the one man in each case,
from the whole civilised world, who is proved and
known to be the most capable and active discoverer
or maker of new knowledge in his subject. Steps
must be taken to ensure the purity and wisdom of the
selection. The effect of a correct selection in such
a case has been seen in one or two instances in the
past. In this country, through the personal influence
of the Prince Consort, the husband of Queen Victoria,
a really great investigator was appointed as head
of the Royal College of Chemistry, founded some
sixty years ago and now incorporated with the
Imperial College of Science. This_ was Hoffman,
a German, who came from Bonn (he was bom and
trained at Giessen) to London and made at the col-

130

THE MAKING OF NEW KNOWLEDGE

lege not only invaluable discoveries himself, but
trained chemists like himself. His intellectual tradi-
tion or heritage remains still with us, although he
himseK was allowed to leave us and to accept a more
honoured and honourable post in Bonn and later in
Berlin. Similarly such men as Johannes Mtiller, of
Berlin, the biologist, and the Cambridge successive
leaders in physics — Stokes, Kelvin, Clark Maxwell,
Raleigh, and J. J. Thomson — exhibit (as many other
instances do) the generative activity of a really great
investigator on those who work with him. There-
fore in the first instance the State must offer what-
ever salary is necessary (say, in each case £5,000 a
year — the salary of those numerous and admirable
officials, H. M. judges) and whatever laboratory,
apparatus, and assistants (say to the equivalent in
each case of £10,000 a year) in order to secure the
greatest discoverer in each line, as head of the
corresponding "institute." In such a matter the
State officials responsible must obtain the advice
of the leading makers of new knowledge of all parts
of the world and form a judgment.

Once we have got our great heads or directors of
institutes, the scheme will work successfully. It will
be the duty of the director of each institute to receive
a certain number of selected "workers" into his
laboratory (or museum, library, or workshop) and to
associate them with himself in investigation. These
workers must be selected from among those who vol-
unteer for the career. I assume that in the new Great

131

THE GREAT STATE

State there would be efficient general instruction
in schools and colleges of a qualifying character, and
that it would be possible for the teachers to nominate
likely young men of not less than twenty-one years
of age to proceed to the State Research Institutions.
Every State college should have the right of nomi-
nating a number in proportion to the number in each
subject of its graduating or final class. I would have
the State pay these youths (at present prices) £150
a year for two years. I will suppose that every
director of an institute is obliged to receive six such
students a year as probationers. At the end of two
years the director would decide either to accept one
or more of his "probationers" as junior assistants
or cut short their career. Every director should
have ten junior assistants, paid £300 a year each
and holding ofiice for no more than three years;
four senior assistants, paid £600 a year each, appointed
for life; and two assistant directors, paid £1,200 a
year each, also for life. The directors — those ap-
pointed after the original nominations — should re-
ceive £2,000, rising to £5,000 a year, according to
standing and the approval by other researchers of
their work, and be appointed for life.

A young man, once admitted as a junior assistant;
would have an attractive and well-paid professional
career before him, his success in which would be
largely determined by the capacity he displayed.
Such a career should attract the ablest men. The
promotion of jtmior to senior assistant shotdd be in

132

THE MAKING OF NEW KNOWLEDGE

the hands of the director, it being open to him to
appoint either one of his own juniors or one from
another laboratory. The same method would be
followed in appointing to assistant directorships.
But the post of director of any institute should
be made on the recommendation of the whole body
of existing directors of institutes and submitted
to an independent State official who should have
power to confirm or to request a reconsideration of
the claims of possible candidates. The post of
director of an institute should always be regarded
as open to any investigator of high distinction in
the subject to which the institute is assigned, what-
ever his nationality or official antecedents. The
council or senate of "directors" would accept as
one of their most solemn duties the selection of the
ablest man as director to fill any vacancy.

As no fees would be received by any of the directors
in connection with their work, it is difficult to make
sure of a standard of efficiency being maintained in
such institutions as I suggest; nor is it obvious, at
once, by what precautious jobbery and nepotism
in the appointments may be rendered unHkely to
occur. In the German universities, the professors
who practically elect or invite a new professor to
fill a vacancy are pecuniarily interested in the fees
of students, and, therefore, in the success and reputa-
tion of the university. Some stimulus of this kind
might be appUed to the State "Institutes of Re-
search" here suggested, by the award of honours

133

THE GREAT STATE

and of extension of premises, increase of staff and
money-grant for expenses, to those institutes which
in a given period, say seven years, had made the
most important discoveries. The publication of
results would be at State expense, and every in-
stitute would produce its own series of memoirs.
Expeditions, explorations, and special enterprises of
the kind would be undertaken by each institute
independently, and the budget of each would com-
prise funds assigned to such purposes.

Such a scheme seems clumsy and mechanical
when sketched in a few words, but with slight
modifications to be added as to time of tenure, pen-
sion, retirement, etc., as to government and source and
amount of funds the most successful centres of re-
search at the present day in Europe, such as the
Institut Parseur in Paris, the British Museum, the
national libraries of great States, and the laboratories
of German universities, are practically conductedin the
spirit of the regulations here suggested, if not direct-
ed by any written laws embodying such regulations.

A view about "original research" and "oppor-
tunities for investigation" exists with which I dis-
agree and should wish to criticise. There is a notion
that a large proportion of young men, such as
university students, are capable of doing valuable
research and making new knowledge if they only are
given place and material upon which to work and a
competence.

134

THE MAKING OF NEW KNOWLEDGE

Let us make at once a broad distinction between
the educational value to the individual of a brief
contact with and participation in actual serious
scientific investigation, on the one hand, and the
importance to the State of the provision of a per-
manent body of selected, specially competent in-
vestigators appointed for life to high professional
office in the public service. The realisation of the
second of these two desiderata will secure that of
the first named. Youths will be attracted to qualify
as "probationers" in large numbers, with the view of
having their capacity tested, and thus possibly
entering on a great profession. On the other hand,
whilst all will benefit by the initial training in re-
search, only a few — ^namely, those who are found to
be reaUy capable of valuable work — will be definitely
received as permanent members of the profession.
At the present moment, even in our great universi-
ties, we do not often get beyond the stage of produc-
ing probationers. There is a tendency in our uni-
versities, and colleges of like rank, for professors, who
shotild be themselves great and active makers of new
knowledge, to spend their energies in inducing
students to do "odds and ends" of original investi-
gation with a view to advertising the fact that the
professors' laboratories or workrooms are full and
their ministrations appreciated. Such fictitious ac-
tivity in research can be produced by a quite inferior
"professor" who devotes himself to the task of
rendering "research" amusing, agreeable, and ap-

I3S

THE GREAT STATE

patently easy to the unfledged and really incapable
student. This undesirable form of activity arises
from the desire to satisfy a demand for research as
the condition of pecuniary support and approval by
the governing bodies of colleges and universities,
whilst really adequate organisation and provision for
the pursuit of scientific research as a serious pro-
fession is withheld. In a system of research insti-
tutes (such as exists in Germany), properly financed
and organised, the "professor" or "director" does
not make himself the merely complacent host and
finisher of his pupils' little efforts in research (like a
drawing-master who suggests, superintends, and com-
pletes a young lady's "works of art "), but is himself
pursuing a definite and serious investigation. He
receives into his laboratory younger men whom he
regards as really competent, and joins their work to
his in the definite problems which he has set himself
to solve. At the same time the yotmg man who
comes to such a head of a laboratory (or museum or
other workshop) with a suggestion of his own as to a
subject for investigation may be received and given
every facility and assistance if it should appear to
the professor that the subject is one which comes
within his outlook and that the would-be investi-
gator is competent. This system I saw at work when
I studied in the "seventies" with Carl Ludwig at
Leipzig, with Gegenbaur at Gena, and earHer with
Strieker at Vienna. It is well known as the system
by which the professors in German universities attain

136

THE MAKING OF NEW KNOWLEDGE

their results — and I did my best thirty years ago
to introduce it at University College in London and
later at Oxford.

What I would deprecate is the notion that the
making of new knowledge of any great value or
amount is an easy thing and one which any young
man who fancies that he has the talent can really
achieve. No doubt in such work every kind and de-
gree of talent can be utilised for what it is worth, and
there must be hewers of wood and drawers of water
in this as in other kinds of enterprise and organisa-
tion. But it is true that selection of real quality and
the organisation of leadership is essential in the
attempt to insure, by State funds, an increase in dis-
covery and the creation of new knowledge. The
notion that the needs of the State in this matter can
be satisfied by a few groups of temporary workers in
pleasant universities, or by, according to every am-
bitious and untested youth, an independent position
enabling him to follow out his possibly valuable but
probably ill-founded progranmie of inquiry, must
lead to sterility and ultimate discredit of all provision
by the State for such purposes.

Another mistake which I should wish to warn my
readers to avoid is that of giving "scholarships" of
from £ioo to £200 a year tenable for two or three
or five years by young men who are supposed to
pursue "original investigations" whilst thus sup-
ported. This giving of scholarships is mere waste
of money unless two other definite provisions are

137

THE GREAT STATE

made — viz., (i) that of professional posts tenable for
life and capable of attracting men of the highest
ability to adopt the profession, and, (2) laboratories
or institutions of research directed by first-rate
investigators where the "scholars" may be trained
by association in the work of these specially gifted
investigators. The present government has pro-
vided a modest sum to such public departments as
the Board of Agriculture which is being, in my
opinion, wasted by those departments in a sort of
charitable doles to "scholars" all over the country —
since no attempt is made to face the essential and
far more difficult and costly problem of setting up
adequate institutions directed by men of exceptional
ability under whom the "scholars" may work and
develop. The scheme is a shirking of responsibility
and a mere piece of popular bribery in place of real
constructive effort.

What we require — and what such a scheme as I
have sketched would provide — ^is a fair and free
chance to every young man to enter upon the career
of "a maker of new knowledge" whilst at the same
time insuring that the definite admission to the
profession shall only be open to those who prove
their fitness for it during probation. It further pro-
vides that the professional career shall be so well paid
and furnished with the means of research that the
ablest men who have the necessary talent shall prefer
it to other professions and means of livelihood.

The scheme admits of large modification and
138

THE MAKING OF NEW KNOWLEDGE

adaptation. Perhaps it would be as well to provide
ab initio that any one of any age may be nominated
as a probationer by a duly recognised authority,
subject to the condition that two-thirds of the
nominations shall be reserved to candidates under
the age of twenty-one years; and it might also be
desirable under special restrictions to extend a candi-
date 's period of probation to four years.

HEALTH AND HEALING IN THE
GREAT STATE

BY C. J. BOND, F.R.C.S.

V

HEALTH AND HEALING IN THE
GREAT STATE

HEALTH

The twofold object of the following essay is to
put forward a worthy conception of Health in its
widest and fullest sense, and to sketch in brief out-
line some of the possibilities which will exist in the
coming time for the attainment of a healthier Life
by the citizens of the Great State.

What then must be our conception of Health?
• Knowledge concerning disease has increased so
much in recent years, and the focussing of individual
and public attention on disease organisms and in-
sanitary surroundings has been so keen, that there
exists to-day a real danger of our losing, sight of the
true proportions of the Health Problem. We are
apt to forget that, while the Healthy Life. includes
recovery from the attacks of disease organisms, it
should also for the citizens of the modern State
embrace resistance to every one of the injurious

143

THE GREAT STATE

influences in the environment which tend to depress
vital activity or to direct it into wrong channels.
And it includes even more than this. Health is more
than mere existence: it means in its widest sense
"Joy in Life"; it presupposes a capacity of response
to the beautiful, the health-giving, the soul-elevating
stimuli of the surrounding world, as well as the power
of overcoming the depressing factors which make for
disease.

This is no merely modern view. Let us glance for a
moment at the attitude of the old Greeks to this same
problem. The citizens of Athens in her best days
conceived of the true, the healthy Life as a har-
monious development of mental and bodily powers,
and as a true adjustment of the man to his environ-
ment. Self-realisation meant to the Greek the union
of a virtuous soul in a beautiful body, and this was
the outcome of the ordered use of natural faculties
under the control of a well-balanced mind. It is
difficult for us to realise the conditions of life which
prevailed among the slave population in the poorer
quarters of ancient Athens and imperial Rome.
We have reason to think that the less fortunate
inhabitants of even these noble cities were familiar
with squalor, with poverty and disease; but in spite
of this there can be little doubt that if the free
Greek or Roman citizen were to catch a glimpse of
life in our crowded cities to-day, though he would
be lost in wonder at the industrial activity, at the
care for the sick and the suffering, and at the com-

144

HEALTH AND HEALING IN THE GREAT STATE

plexity of our modern life, he would no less certainly
marvel at the dim eye, the inelastic step, the Kstless
demeanour of many of our toiling workers — and he
would read in these tokens the signs of a reduced
vitality, of a lost joyous activity, and of an absence
of that Harmony to which he was so deeply attached.
Highly trained in physical culture, familiar with
fountains and baths, he would wonder also at the
lack of personal cleanliness, the dirt, the ugliness of
oiu- surroundings, the evidences of monotonous toil,
and he would search in vain in our crowded courts
and sunless streets for the grace of movement and
the dignity of bearing which come from life in the
air and the sun. And he would marvel yet more
when he learned that those whom he met were not
slaves, but free citizens, and that they might, if
they wished, be rulers in their own city and masters in
their own homes.

But, after all, this Life of Health and Harmony and
full development was only realised by a small portion
of the Greek community. In spite of its democratic
form of government, the "Many," even in Athens,
never lived the fuller Life, and this was indeed one
of the causes of her fall. We now realise that the
possibility of a healthy and happy Life must be within
the reach of every citizen, rich and poor, in every
community if that community is to escape the
stagnation and decay which eventually overtook
these ancient civilisations. The Greek knew but
little of the evolution of Human societies; he was

145 L

THE GREAT STATE

ignorant of the forces which control organic develop-
ment and of the real causes of disease and decay.
Although we may fail to apply our knowledge, we,
on the other hand, do at any rate know to-day that
Health depends on successful adaptation, on adjust-
ment to a very complex social as well as natural
environment, and we are beginning to realise that
Perfect Health means living in harmony with all that
is best in our physical, intellectual, social, and moral
atmosphere.

If, then, modem life is the outcome of ages of evolu-
tion and struggle, if healthy Life is a matter of
adjustment to both good and bad stimuli, then the
pursuit of Health must be carried out in accordance
with the laws which control Hereditary capacity and
Adaptive Response in other fields of human activity.

Neither are we left in entire ignorance as to what
these life-controlling forces are. We know that all
adaptation, aU individual and social development,
depends on the mutual interaction of certain factors.
These are :

(i). Hereditarily transmitted capacity to re-
spond in different ways and in different de-
grees to different environmental stimuli.

(2). The Conditions under which this Capacity
is exercised.

(3). The Acquirements which are made by
the individual or the Community as the result
of the exercise of this capacity of Response.
146

HEALTH AND HEALING IN THE GREAT STATE

And

(4). The various Environmental Stimuli which
have to be responded to, the factors towards
which adjustment has to be made.

These are the biological foundations on which the
truly Healthy Life must be built. These are the
factors with which all who attempt to reconstruct
Human Society must reckon, and it is on these lines
that the interests of the citizen must be promoted
and secured in the Great State. We must safeguard
the supply of innate individual Capacity. We must
stimulate the exercise of this Capacity in aU healthy
directions. We must improve the conditions under
which the Response of Life is carried on. We must
utilise to the utmost the Acquirements already made.
But this means that we must deal with both the in-
dividual and his environment, we must invoke the
aid of Individualism as well as Socialism in the
Great State. Now if it be true, as it undoubtedly is,
that the conditions of modem industrial life tend to
depress rather than call forth the highest activities of
our citizens; and if it be also true, as we know it to
be, that, while the individual does to a certain extent
control his environment, the environment also helps
to determine the type of individual, then we must
recognise the disquieting fact that present-day condi-
tions of Life in our large cities, although they may be
consistent with a low death-rate, do not make for
national health in its widest and best sense. Be-

147

THE GREAT STATE

fore we can set up a standard of Life worthy of the
citizens of the Great State, two things must happen.
Individual capacity to live the fuller life must be
further developed, and the conditions under which
this capacity for wider existence is exercised must
be vastly improved at both ends of the social scale.
If then, bearing in mind our biological limitations,
we define Perfect Health as that state of body and
mind which is most resistent to injurious and most
responsive to beneficial stimuli, we see at once that
it is not enough to banish disease organisms or to
bring about immunity against infection. We must
not rest content with the removal and purification of
sewage, with the regulation of food and water supply,
the ventilation of factories, and the control of un^
healthy occupations and of licensed houses, we must
do these things, but we must also insure that the at-
mosphere of the Home and the Workroom is flooded
with moral sunshine; we must strive by intellectual
effort and by artistic surroundings to prevent atrophy
of mind as well as stunting of bodily stature.

It is here that we come in contact with all that is
meant by Education, with Ethical training, with
Intellectual culture, with progressive Legislation —
in fact, with all the factors which make for human
progress. Judged by this standard, the parent, the
schoolmaster, the artist, the man of science, the re-
ligious instructor, the municipal councillor, the
legislator, all are or should be physicians of the mind
or of the body.

148

HEALTH AND HEALING IN THE GREAT STATE

For there are only two ways of bringing about
harmonious adjustment in matters of life and con-
duct as well as in matters of health. We must
either adapt ourselves to our surroundings, or we
must adapt our surroundings to ourselves. The
first is the method of primitive organic evolution.
Whereas it is by the second method that social man
has been enabled to siirround himself with the com-
plex environment of civilisation and with the possi-
bilities of physical and psychical development that
civilisation brings.

There is no more striking object-lesson in the
different application of these two evolutionary
methods than that which is afEorded by the atti-
tude of civilised and uncivilised societies respec-
tively to harmful environmental agencies like alcohol
and disease. In the primitive community, mutual
protection and co-operation (the conditions which
favour recovery from disease) hardly exist. If
primitive man, like the animal, contracts disease,
he perishes, hence he must be preadapted, and
through the stem process of natural selection in
weeding out susceptible individuals he has evolved
an innate resistance to those diseases of which he
has had sufficient racial experience. But with so-
cial man it is different; improved medical treatment,
mutual protection, and care during sickness all
favour recovery from diseaSe. It follows that the
necessity for being Immune by nature grows less
as the possibility of becoming Immune by Art grows

149

THE GREAT STATE

greater. Hence it comes about that civilised man
has evolved a capacity of acquiring Immunity by
individual experience in such diseases as allow of
recovery, while he still retains some of the natural
Immunity against lethal diseases possessed by his
earlier ancestors.

One long chapter in the history of civilisation
contains the record of the gradually increasing power
of control by Social man over that part of his en-
vironment which has to do with disease, and the
success which has attended his efforts to banish
disease must provide the sanction for further effort
along these same lines of environmental control.
But such methods take us further and further away
from crude natural selection. Constant vigilance
on the part of Society is urgently needed if we are to
escape the dangers of decadence of capacity and re-
laxation of individual effort which modem social
conditions render possible. Moreover, such methods
depend on mutual co-operation and they involve some
curtailment of individual liberty. For this reason
in the coming age it will be wrong to be ill if the ill-
ness be avoidable. Under the old regime of natural
selection the penalty for non-adaptation was extinc-
tion, and, though under the new regime of mutual co-
operation and environmental control destruction may
be avoided, yet some sort of penalty must still remain ;
either the individual or society or both must suffer in
the long run for the lack of efficiency and the want of
adaptation which ill health implies. As under the old

ISO

HEALTH AND HEALING IN THE GREAT STATE

regime so under the new, the price of harmonious
adaptation to a widening environment — ^in other
words, the price of health in a progressive com-
munity — is constant vigilance. Unless the citizen is
immune by nature, or unless he becomes immune by
Art, or until the organisms of disease are permanently
banished from the environment of the Great State,
the struggle must still continue, though the methods
of warfare may become far less cruel. And when
the victory is secured, one result, and that perhaps
the greatest, will be the setting free of a larger
volume of vital energy in new departments of Life
and Labour, new springs of Being, new responses
to higher calls in religion, science, and art, and then
will gush forth again the eternal fountain of hope
and of joy in Life, which has now for a season sunk
so low.

Our very familiarity with suffering and dis-
harmony has clouded our vision: we accept the
presence of disease as necessary, and we forget the
enormous waste of human life which these ages of
wandering in the wilderness of disease have caused.
We can with difficulty gauge the gain in capacity for
productive labour that the saving of even a few in-
fant lives implies. Ignorance and Vice, Vice-caused
disease and disease-produced Vice — ^these have also
contributed towards the bankruptcy in Health
of our city toilers and city dwellers. Disease and
Poverty, leanness of body and leanness of soul,
these work hand in hand, and these also must dis-

THE GREAT STATE

appear in the Great State in the new era of Free
Trade in human capacity as well as in material
possessions^-

But besides these failures in adjustment to
diseases which come from without, there are also
disharmonies which come from within. There are
deficient capacities as well as injurious surroundings,
there are errors in individual development of an
hereditary kind.

These inborn deficiencies represent isolated flaws
in that mosaic pattern of mental and bodily con-
stitution which recent biological research tells us is
the hereditary equipment of each individual; they
may even represent a total failure in hereditary
design, such as we find in the innately criminal and
the congenitally feeble-minded. For such as these
there will be neither use nor room in the Great State.
Even now the problem of how to eliminate this
residuum of human Unimprovability urgently presses
for solution. The drain of unproductive existence
on productive activity is already far too great, far
greater than is necessary, as we believe, to favour
the growth or to call forth the exercise of benevo-
lence. The altruistic feelings of mankind can be
more efficiently promoted by exercise in other fields
and on worthier objects.

Man has no more power to overtake the results of
anti-social conduct in the field of race production
than in any other field of human activity. Here, as
elsewhere, the only way of escape is to set about the

152

HEALTH AND HEALING IN THE GREAT STATE

elimination of capacity for anti-social conduct, or, if
this be as yet impossible, to prevent as far as may
be its exercise by those unfortunate individuals who
inherit it. Our hope of success lies, not in a return
to the old regime of natural selection, but in an ex-
tension of the newer method of environmental con-
trol. We must learn, and that quickly, to apply to
the problem of Race Culture those methods which
we have already employed successfully in our
struggle with disease. If, owing to lack of knowl-
edge, further advance along Positive Eugenic lines
should be at present too difficult, we can at any rate
make a beginning by preventing the perpetuation
of those characters which lead to race destruction.

It is impossible to consider this vital problem of
Race Culture in its relation to National Health with-
out recognising that a movement of world-wide im-
portance has set in in nearly all civilised and pro-
gressive communities, in the direction of a voluntary
reduction of the human birth-rate. This movement
is unconnected with questions of food-supply, stand-
ards of life, or human fertility. It has originated in
the Upper and Middle Social Classes among the more
educated portion of the population as the outcome of
recently acquired knowledge concerning the trans-
mission of human life from parents to offspring and
the application of this knowledge to a definite end,
the voluntary control of the family. From our
present point of view it is of especial interest because
it affords another instance of the gradual emergence

IS3

THE GREAT STATE

of modem society from the control of crude natural
selection. It is another example of the extension
of the method of environmental control by Social
man into regions of human life formerly almost
entirely free from such interference, and, like all
other movements which interfere with the free play
of natural selection and which aim at rendering
the conditions of life less exacting, it is fraught
with great possibilities for both good and harm.

Like other examples of the exercise of environ-
mental control by Social man, this movement must
also be judged by the motives which inspire the
conduct in each individual case. If these be un-
worthy, if the thing aimed at be selfish indulgence,
if the satisfaction of individual desires be set be-
fore social welfare, then it is a crime against society.
If, on the other hand, the end aimed at be better
chances of Life for offspring, if due regard be paid to
the relative claims of individual and social welfare,
then neither the- verdict of public opinion nor
ecclesiastical disapproval can convert the exercise of
foresight and control, when prompted by worthy
motives, into an immoral act.

But, however we may judge of this movement, it
wiU eventually be judged by its fruits, by the effect
it has on those communities which practise it.

Whether it be destined to bring about the self-
destruction or the self -renovation of Human Society
will depend on the type of citizen it tends to perpet-
uate — that is to say, whether it encourages capacity

IS4

HEALTH AND HEALING IN THE GREAT STATE

in the individual to appreciate right aims and to
exercise self-control in right directions — much also
depends on whether Public opinion appreciates in
time the magnitude of the movement and directs it
along right, that is, along Eugenic lines. For, though
at present it is chiefly limited to the Middle and
Upper classes of Society, it is gradually reaching the
Lower strata and will eventually permeate the
whole. And herein lies a possibility for good. The
movement may provide a way of escape from some
of the greatest of the burdens which oppress Hu-
manity. The warlike nations are those in whom an
expanding population is shut up within circum-
scribed boundaries, and increase of population has a
greater influence than peace tribunals on the Peace
of the world. Other vital sociological problems, such
as the restriction of competition, the possibility of
earlier marriage, and the attainment of a higher
standard of Life by the working classes, and the
reduction of Prostitution are all also intimately
related to this question of the voluntary control of
the birth-rate. This at any rate is certain, that the
voice of PubHc opinion and the voice of Social custom,
if they are fundamentally opposed to true Social
welfare, will eventually fall on deaf ears.

Some students of Sociology have sought in this
voluntary reduction of the Human birth-rate an
explanation of the decay of past civilisations. It is
true that Empires and civiHsations, like individuals,
die from above downwards. Bu,t the real cause of

iSS

THE GREAT STATE

the decay of nations, as of .families, is growth of
environmental control — that is, opportunity for
satisfying desires — out of proportion to natural
capacity to use these opportunities to worthy and
public ends. Material civilisation outstrips ethical
civilisation. The fatal facilities afforded by luxury
lead to a damping down of effort in worthy directions,
and unless innate capacity rises above its siu--
roundings this leads eventually to stagnation and
decay.

In so far, then, as this exercise of voluntary control
over the increase of the population is exerted for
selfish ends, it does constitute a grave danger to
Society; if, on the other hand, its aim be the removal
of some of the worst results of unrestricted compe-
tition and faulty life conditions, it may, if properly
directed, prove a powerful means of progress.

The danger lies not n the increased power of
environmental control nor n its employment in
the field of race culture, but in not using the increased
power to right ends; and the remedy is to be sought,
not in a return to Natural Selection, but in a further
extension of the newer method of artificial selection,
under proper control.

The only efficient way of dealing with this impor-
tant problem of the voluntary control of the human
birth-rate is to bring about such social and in-
dustrial conditions as will render the fulfilment of
the duty of race production and of rearing healthy
offspring economically possible, on the one hand,

156

HEALTH AND HEALING IN THE GREAT STATE

and to develop by Eugenic methods, and to foster
the exercise of an innate love of parenthood and a
sense of parental responsibility in the citizens, on
the other. We must, in fact, deal with this as with
all Social problems, by attacking it on its individual
as well as on its environmental aspect. If the social
and economic conditions of modem life are such that
a high standard of parental responsibility cannot be
exercised, the mere substitution of easier circum-
stances win not evolve a love for parenthood in
citizens in whom it is by Nature absent.

This in effect means that the whole attitude of
society to these vital problems of sex and parent-
hood needs revision in the daylight of modem
knowledge and testing by modem conceptions of
public and private duty. At the same time we
must not forget that in thus speaking as though
we ourselves were in this way or that solving social
problems, what we really mean is that in this way
or that these problems are in the course of social
evolution solving themselves.

We may now summarise our conceptions of In-
dividual and Communal health by regarding it as
harmonious adjustment on the part of the individual
citizen and the State to both the good and the bad
agencies in the environment, and not merely as
the absence of insanitary surroundings and of
disease organisms. But Public and Private Health
so regarded is under present social conditions un-
attainable except by a few of the more richly en-

157

THE GREAT STATE

dowed or happily circumstanced members of the com-
munity. Like the slaves of ancient Athens, a large
part of Society is still disinherited as regards the
legacies of Health. Under present industrial and
social conditions healthy activities may be over-
exercised, and healthy desires may go unsatisfied.
Capacity for labour, over-exercised to the point
or exhaustion or exercised in monotonous toil, with-
out the relief which comes from change of occupa-
tion, or the stimulus of delight in the object toiled
for. Capacity for feeling, and action unexercised or
exercised under wrong conditions — these things are
responsible for much of the disharmony of our
artificial city life; these things are incompatible with
perfect health.

There are only two ways of righting disharmony
in every department of Life. Either the environ-
mental conditions must be improved to allow of
the exercise of the larger faculties, or the capaci-
ties must be reduced to the level of the narrower
enwonment.

It will not be enough even in the coming time
that there will be no waste of infant life, the result
of lack of knowledge or lack of care, or that, by
the control of accidental, and the removal of pre-
ventable causes of disease, the life of the adult
citizen will be prolonged to the full span of human
vital capacity. The citizens of the Great State will
ask for more than this. They will claim to be. de-
livered from the strain on body and sotd which

is8

HEALTH AND HEALING IN THE GREAT STATE

comes from disharmony between capacity and the
conditions under which capacity is exercised, as
well as from the drain on vital energy which now
results from suffering and disease. After the satis-
faction of the immediate needs of existence they will
look for a reserve of energy which may be spent in
enlarging the horizon of life, and in this clearer
atmosphere they will taste once more the Joy of
Living. It is in this way that the problem of
Health in the widest sense is linked up with the
problem of Education, on the one hand, and the
possibilities of social, economic, and industrial re-
form, on the other.

Among Health-promoting factors two of the most
important, at any rate under the depressing condi-
tions of our modern industrial life, are "Healthy
Recreation" and "Change of Occupation." Other
writers will deal with these aspects of life under
the better conditions of the Great State, but when
that freer interchange which we all hope for has
been brought about between the life of the country
and the life of the city, when the fresh air and the
freedom and the rest of the country can be obtained
by the town dweller, and the means of easy com-
munication and opportunities for social intercourse
reach to the country, then some of the lifelessness
that results from exhaustion and monotony will be
done away with.

We now realise that the biological foundations
are the only firm foundations on which we can build

IS9

THE GREAT STATE

up Health or resist Disease, and in the coming time
we shall also learn that Innate Capacity, the con-
ditions under which it is exercised, and the acquire-
ments that it makes, must also provide the funda-
mental principles by which the education of the
child, the life and labour of the adiilt citizen, and the
duties of the State must be guided and controlled.

II

HEALING

We have now formed some conception of what
Communal and Individual Health in its widest and
best sense will mean under the improved social con-
ditions of the Great State, and we must pass on to
consider some of the ways in which this fuller Life
may be realised.

In the first place, a true sense of the relative
importance of the objects to be aimed at is very
necessary if we are to avoid the error of confusing
mediate with ultimate ends. For while the final
aim must be the Health, the fuller life of the com-
munity as a whole, the efficiency and the welfare of
the profession of Healing are of fundamental impor-
tance as a necessary step towards the realisation of
the goal.

One thing, at any rate, is clear : if Health means
Harmonious Adjustment to environmenta condi-
tions, then every one whose business it is to bring

1 60

HEALTH AND HEALING IN THE GREAT STATE

about health must be an adapter and a harmoniser.
The Profession of Healing must concern itself with
all efforts which tend to bring about harmonious
adjustment between the citizens and their environ-
ment. It must be occupied, not only with the re-
moval of insanitary surroundings and the promotion
of individual resistance to infection, but it must also
strive to develop a normal mental and bodily re-
sponse on the part of the citizens to all kinds of
healthy stimuli.

Before we can indicate the lines along which
future progress in this direction may be looked for
we must first pass in brief review one or two aspects
of the relationship which at present exists between
the Medical Profession and the Public. To begin
with, the service of Health is vital to Society. It
is indeed so vital that it has become one of the
fundamental concerns of the State that medical and
surgical treatment should be available for all, that
the healthy Hfe and the means of attaining it, as
far as such means are attainable, should be within
the reach of every member of the community, poor
as well as rich.

How do we stand to-day in regard to this matter ?
The treatment of disease is now carried on in two
ways: by the Institutional method and the Home-
treatment method. Of these two the Institutional
is by far the most efficient and the most valuable
from the point of view of the cure of disease; but
under present conditions it is quite inadequate to

i6i M

THE GREAT STATE

meet the needs of the great mass of the working-
class population, at any rate in this country in which
the General Hospitals are supported by voluntary
contributions, and are not subsidised by the Mu-
nicipalities or the State. It is calculated that
Hospital accommodation is only available for from
twenty to fifty per cent, of the population it ought
to benefit. It touches, in fact, only a portion of the
mass of disease amongst the poor.

When we turn to the treatment of disease in
working-class homes, we find a still more unsatisfac-
tory condition of things. A great part of the con-
tract medical and surgical practice of Great Britain
— at any rate that part of it which is concerned with
the Home visiting and the treatment of working
people in private surgeries, hospital out-patient de-
partments, and out-patient clinics under the Club
system — ^is suffering from certain serious inherent
defects which tend to bring about inefficiency of
treatment and a false mental attitude on the part
of the patients and the medical attendant towards
the whole problem of disease. In the first place,
owing to unrestricted competition among medical
men themselves, this contract practice is inad-
equately remunerated. This means that a great
number of sufferers from real or imaginary diseases
must pass through the medical attendant's hands
if he is to make a living, and this means hurried
observation, imperfect diagnosis, and inadequate
treatment in many cases. Further, it brings about

162

HEALTH AND HEALING IN THE GREAT STATE

a tendency to make up for lack of thoroughness in
investigation by a routine system of drug -pre-
scribing, with the result that a false sense of satis-
faction is thereby engendered in the minds of
patients who are often ignorant of the real relation-
ship between the administration of drugs and the
curing and prevention of disease. An extravagant
belief in the necessity for drugs in the treatment of
disease has sprung up in the mind of the Public, and
an easy acquiescence in this line of least resistance
in the minds of some medical men which is de-
moralising to the Profession.

It thus happens, through the fault of a system
rather than through the fault of the individual, that
the true ftmction of the "Healer" is obscured and
misunderstood, and in many cases a futile attempt
to treat symptoms or to remove results has over-
shadowed the more lengthy and more difficult but
more efficient method of dealing with the' causes of
disease. The real remedy for this unsatisfactory
state of things is a deeper appreciation of the true
meaning of "Health," on the one hand, and a clearer
recognition of the real function of the "Healer," on
the other. If some of the energy which is now being
expended by medical men in the routine visiting of
long lists of contract and club patients, and in the
prescribing and dispensing of drugs for the relief
of symptoms, could be directed to the prevention
of the beginnings of disease in people's homes, and to
the provision of efficient institutional treatment for

163

THE GREAT STATE

those persons whose recovery would be materially
aided by removal to better surroundings, then not
only would the health of the people be more effi-
ciently safeguarded, but the lot of the doctor would
be a more useful, a more self-respecting, and therefore
a more happy one. But this means two things: it
means a great extension of the Institutional system,
and it means a reorganisation of the system of
Contract and Club Practice, through which the poor
now; obtain medical assistance

With regard to the first it is hopeless to look for
any great extension of hospital accommodation on
the lines of voluntary support. Hospital adminis-
tration has in this country now passed through the
experimental and initiatory stage, during which it
is wiser to leave it to the stimulus of individual
effort and voluntary support. It has become an
absolute necessity of our social and industrial life.
General Hospital administration now requires the
integrating influence of State control to bring it
into co-ordination with Poor Law Infirmaries, In-
fectious Hospitals, and with other voluntary and
municipal health agencies. Moreover, there are
many indications that it is in this direction that
the problem of Hospital administration will eventu-
ally be solved.

Things are also moving in the same direction in
the domiciliary side of medical practice. Owing to
unrestricted competition among its own members,
the profession of Medicine is suffering from lack of

164

HEALTH AND HEALING IN THE GREAT STATE

co-ordination of effort, waste of energy, and want of
control; and owing to the same cause it is also suffer-
ing from inadequate remuneration and, as a further
consequence, from a lack of appreciation on the part
of the Public of the real value of its services and the
true position it ought to occupy in the State.

The uncertainty and the obscurity which hung
around the methods of the "Healer" in the past
still tend to obstruct his vision and prejudice his
authority, now that he is called upon to play the
part of health adviser to the community. Society
forgets that the Profession of Healing has long ago
discarded the old garments of magic and superstition,
which clothed it in infancy, and that it has almost
succeeded in shaking off the fetters of tradition and
dogma which still encumber its old companions
Theology and Law, and that it is both ready and
willing to enter on the duties of mature age and
wider experience. On the other hand, the com-
munity is also suffering from the imperfections of
the present system, but in a different way. It
suffers from the inefficiency of service which comes
from uncontrolled contract practice, and from the
demoralisation which follows a too ready acquies-
cence in a symptomatic as opposed to a preventive
and radical treatment of disease. The eventual
remedy for both difficulties can only be a National
Health Service in which the conditions of service
include adequate remuneration and a reserve of
time, money, opportunity, and legislative freedom

i6s

THE GREAT STATE

for progressive development, for the acquirement of
new knowledge, and for the application of new and
improved methods in the treatment of disease.

The Science and Art of HeaUng and those who
practise it must be protected against unnecessary
interference by oflEicialdom, against hampering and
restrictive legislation prompted by a sentimental or
ill-informed public opinion; and this must be se-
cured by an efficient representation of medical
opinion and medical interests on Municipal and
State councils.

In the same way the interests of the community
must also be safeguarded against undue regimenta-
tion in matters of health. False assumption of au-
thority in administrative matters on the part of
the Profession must be prevented by Free Trade in
the National Health Service, by free choice of doctor
on the part of the individual citizen or social groups,
and by freedom on the part of the public to decline
any special or improved form of treatment, subject
always to the important condition that such refusal
does not endanger public safety or run counter to
the interests of the community.

Now, this scheme of a national health service
must be conceived on a well-thought-out plan. It
must embrace the Health interests of the individual
citizen, on the one hand, and social, municipal, and
State interests, on the other. Here, as in all matters
of State enterprise and Mtmicipal trading, there are
certain things which are best left to individual effort

1 66

ALTH AND HEALING IN THE GREAT STATE

I voluntary support, and there are others which

better done by social co-operation. To the
ner must be relegated the medical attendance,
:itutional and domiciliary, of all those more
;unately circumstanced citizens who desire and

in a position to pay for medical services other
n, or over and above those provided by the
te. For the remainder of the population which
braces the very poor and the small salary-earning
I small wage-earning class a National Health Ser-
g should in this country develop along the foUow-

lines :
>)-ordination must be brought about among exist-

institutions for the treatment of disease. The
untary General Hospitals, Convalescent Homes,
I Sanatoria must be linked up with the rate and
te- supported institutions, the Municipal In-
;ipus Hospitals, the Municipal and County Asy-
is, the Mtmicipal Sanatoria, the School Clinics,

Poor Law Infirmaries, and the Prisons Medical
vice. The present honorary Staffs of the General
spitals would be paid salaries, they would be
ught into relationship with medical officers of
,1th, with the Staffs of Infectious Hospitals, of
dums, of Sanatoria, and of School Clinics, with
)r Law Officers working in Poor Law Infirmaries,
I with Prison doctors. The whole of this great
iitutional system, with its vast material and wide
)orttuiities for the study of disease, wotdd be-
le available for the purposes of medical eduea-
167

THE GREAT STATE

tion, not only so, but a far larger ntunber of already
qualified and practising medical men would be thus
enabled to keep in touch with new knowledge and
new methods, for it is especially true in a growing
science like medicine that for any seeker after
knowledge to be satisfied with past experience or
to attempt to live on the record of past attainments
is woefully to restrict usefulness, even if it does not
hinder success. And with this Institutional part
of the National Health Service must be linked up a
corresponding Nursijig Service.

The other or the domiciliary side of the Health
Service, the visiting of the citizens in their own
homes, would be carried out by District and Divi-
sional Medical Officers. They would treat such
cases as could be well treated at home, and such as
were too ill for removal, or not sufficiently ill to re-
quire institutional treatment, and they would be
assisted in their work by an organised District
Nursing Service.

One very important part of the duty of these
Medical Officers would be the periodic visiting of
all households and the reporting on the health
and life conditions of the householder and his de-
pendants. This need be neither inquisitorial nor
offensive, if there is a proper system of local controls
over the appointments of the medical men concerned.
There need be no more inconvenience in the visit
of the Medical Officer than in the visit of any other
Municipal ofificial. In this way the early beginnings

i68

ALTH AND HEALING IN THE GREAT STATE

iisease would be often detected and the preven-
1 of disease wotdd become a reality, for the health
horities. would be provided with accurate statistics
[ rehable information about disease. In this way,
, the work of the Medical Practitioner would be
ed in dignity and in tone. He would be one
Dng many officers occupied in a great national
uiry into the causes of, as well as the best way
seating disease; he would feel that he was being
d for work of value to the community, as well as
the individual.

Vhat are the objections which can be brought
ivard against such a scheme?
doubtless those who dread the introduction of
:alled socialistic methods into any new depart-
ats of human life will again raise the objection
ich was formerly raised against the introduction
State Education. So-called free doctoring is to
h persons on a level with so-called free education :
h are equally vicious. But, in both cases, such
ectors overlook the fact that in reality neither
benefits of a National Health Service nor the
lefits of a State-provided Education are really
;; as a matter of fact, that service cannot be truly
cribed as free in which both the expenditure and
effort which are necessary to provide it are shared
all directly or indirectly. It is only free in the
se that it is available for all, just as it is provided
all.

ndeed, a question of even greater importance
169

THE GREAT STATE

to-day is not so much that of the free provision of
medical attendance as of the desirability of the
compulsory adoption of the means of attaining
health by all citizens. If, like the attainment of
knowledge, the attainment of Health is so vital to
national welfare that the State makes it compul-
sory, then, like the service of knowledge, the service
of Health must be free, too. If the State has learned
to recognise that the uneducated citizen is a source
of national inefficiency, surely the State must also
realise that the unhealthy and the diseased citizen
is a source of national danger. We are only begin-
ning to realise that it is just as wrong to be ill, if
the illness be preventable, as it is wrong to be igno-
rant if the ignorance can be dispelled. It is not
enough that a small proportion of the members
of any community should be robustly healthy or
highly trained; the whole body of citizens must be
raised up to a certain minimum level of mental and
bodily efficiency: above this average minimum of
Health and Sanity there will always remain plenty
of room for further development. Moreover, and
most important of all, the provision by the State of
the means of attaining Health, if it be also accom-
panied by care in seeing that these means are adopted,
is, like State education, free from the disadvantage
of producing concomitant demoralisation and relax-
ation of individual effort ; for both the attainment of
Health and the attainment of Knowledge recognise
the biological law of Response, they both presuppose

170

lLth and healing in the great state

3 effort on the part of the citizen benefited, while
increased efficiency of body and of mind which
It lead in their turn to increased capacity for
ler effort.

is those well-meant but misguided social efforts
meliorate the conditions of life among the poor
the sick which do not include the recognition
tie fundamental necessity for some responsive
t on the part of the persons benefited, that
e demoraUsation of character. The provision of
thier surroundings and opportunities for the ex-
e of higher capacities does not faU within this
^ory. Let no one suppose that the provision
healthier and better environment will bring
it a less worthy type of citizen,
it there wiU also be objections on the part of
ical Men. One of the difficulties in the way of
idling the Medical Profession to the idea of a
onal Health Service is the suspicion and dis-
with which individual medical men regard all
ls of contract service and payment per capita,
y salary for whole or part time service. This
icion and dislike arises largely from past ex-
snce of this kind of service at the hands of the
idly Societies and Clubs under the old regime
irestricted competition. When we inquire into
svolution of these different methods of remunera-
we find that payment by individual patients for
ddual services rendered is as a rule found in less
ressive communities than payment per capita
171

THE GREAT STATE

or by salary for whole-time service. In industrial
life, piece-work and time-work correspond more or
less accurately to payment for services rendered and
payment by salary in professional life. Now, it is
a significant fact that while in different trades some
trade-unions recognise piece-work and some time-
work, yet no trade-unions recognise piece-work un-
less it is compatible with collective bargaining. In
fact, both employers and employed adopt either
method according as it leads to advantageous bar-
gaining. Of the two methods of remuneration for
professional services, payment for whole-time ser-
vice is far more consistent with collective bargain-
ing than payment by individual patients for services
rendered, while payment per capita stands in an
intermediate position as a form of bargain, between
the State Agreement, on the one hand, and the Agree-
ment between the doctor and his individual patients,
on the other. In fact. State or Municipal salary for
whole-time service (and payment per capita by
Friendly Societies in a less degree) tends to approxi-
mate the old basis of agreement between doctor and
patient to the modern basis of agreement which
obtains between employer and employed in indus-
trial life. It substitutes the newer relationship of
one employer (the State) to many employed, for
the older relationship of many employers to one em-
ployed, as in the agreement between the private
doctor and his individual patients, and by so doing
if favours the possibiHty of collective bargaining on

172

lLth and healing in the great state

part of the employed; and on this ground it
it to receive favourable consideration by the
ession, or at any rate that portion of the Pro-
on which realises that its relationships with the
ic in the future will be more and more regulated,
ir as remuneration for services is concerned, by
e-union methods of the better kind.
Dr we know that the average employer constant-
eeks to get more work for the same payment,
e the average employee desires to get more pay
;he same amount of work ; and both alike favour
; or piece work according as either method
IS best calculated to bring about this result,
ce it comes about that it is impossible to pre-
; the degradation of the standard of Professional
under unrestricted competition, just as it is
Dssible to prevent it in competitive industrial oc-
itions, unless the terms and conditions of service
N of some form of collective bargaining between
individuals or the groups concerned. Hence the
ortance of securing some method of remuneration
:h allows of collective bargaining,
wing to a deficient social conscience in many
;ens, both employers and employed, and in spite
ducation and moral training, conduct continues
)e directed by considerations of supposed self-
rest rather than by considerations of social
are. It is possible that in a regenerated State,
lie-spirited conduct, inspired by worthy motives,
allow of a return to the old individual relation-
173

THE GREAT STATE

ships in matters of remuneration for service ren-
dered, and that a fair reward for whole-hearted ser-
vice will not need to be secured by any form of col-
lective bargaining; but that brighter day has not
yet dawned, and we are now concerned with the
means by which the end may be attained rather than
with the end itself.

The ultimate test of the fitness of any institution
or industrial enterprise or profession for munici-
palisation or nationalisation must be UtiHty. It
must be the relative value to Society of such in-
stitutional enterprise or professional service under
municipal or State as against individual control, and
this will to a certain extent depend on the degree
of integration and co-ordination, that is on the
state of development of the enterprise or service
in question, and on the nature of the service which
it can render to Society. Some enterprises are more
organised than others, some services are more vital
than others to the welfare of Society. As a matter
of fact, those branches of the medical profession
which are concerned with Municipal and institutional
administration, with preventive medicine and public
health, have already reached a certain level of or-
ganisation. It is the private practice and the
domiciliary side of professional service that need
bringing up to the same level.

The enormous importance of the problem makes it
a matter of vital concern that the ingoing informa-
tion and the outgoing energy of a National Health

174

/^LTH AND HEALING IN THE GREAT STATE

vice should be co-ordinated in one central brain
me department under the control of a Minister
iiealth, and this Minister must combine in him-
, or be able to obtain at first-hand, medical
wledge and a knowledge of biological Sociol-
; the Health Department wiU be the most
iamental of all the departments of State. It

be called upon to advise other departments
ceming the biological principles upon which
cation and labour must be founded, upon which
activities of the soldier, sailor, and other public
?^ants must be guided; and upon which the con-

and reformation of the mentally deficient, the
per, and the criminal must be carried out.
laving attempted to answer various objections
t may be raised against it, having discussed the
stion of a National Health Service from the
it of view of the State, we must now consider

effect of nationalisation on the Medical Pro-
ion itself. As soon as we rise above the level
;he primitive society, with its impelling desires
satisfy only the primary needs of existence, we
le tmder the control of other motives and meet
1 other springs of conduct. The desire for the
robation of fellow-citizens, the wish to stand
. with society — these are the motives which direct
lan conduct and sway the actions of civilised
ildnd on a large scale in the pursuit of worthy and
rorthy ends. It is this which leads to the amass-
of wealth, the acquirement of power, and it is
175

THE GREAT STATE

this which, if conceived in a selfish spirit or moulded
by a debased standard of social approbation, brings
about the vicious circle in which unworthy conduct
in the influential citizen vitiates public opinion;
and debased public opinion approves of the un-
unworthy conduct. Everything turns on the aver-
age level of public spirit and the standard of public
duty in every community. The nationaUsation
of the Health Service, like that of every other ser-
vice, is undesirable and unsafe until a certain stand-
ard of social and ethical development has been
reached by the community. Indeed, it is only pos-
sible where a civic consciousness is present among
both those who render the service and those who
benefit by it.

We believe that in Great Britain, at any rate,
such a stage of civic evolution has already been
reached.

But there are other and important reasons why the
relationship between the Profession of Healing and
the community should be a State relationship rather
than a relationship between individual citizens. So
long as medical treatment is concerned with the
protection of the individual citizen against outside
infection, against those injurious environmental
factors which prejudice personal health, it does not
run counter to individual inclinations, and so long
even as medical advice concerns itself with the pres-
ent it does not evoke any great opposition. The
difficulty arises when we begin to act in the interests

176

^LTH AND HEALING IN THE GREAT STATE

uture generations. Now there are sources of
a,se outside the control of individual doctors, out-
the authority of Medical Officers of Health and
tary Authorities. As we have already seen in
; I of this essay there are congenital deficiencies,
rs of development which are not the result of
ise organisms or of insanitary surroundings. It
L regard to these mental and bodily disabilities
:h arise from the faulty union of deficient natural
lencies that the profession of HeaHng, when
ing with the problem of race culture, will be
easingly called upon to decide; and, if it is to
tk with authority in cases where duty to the
; generation does not always coincide with the
res of the individual citizen, then it becomes
issary that the skilled adviser shall be free from
rant opposition and supported by the general
[ligence of the community. This can only be
red by placing the relationship between adviser
citizen on the secure basis of a State-controlled
State-recognised service in a State which is the
•ession of a highly developed collective mind.

is only from such a standpoint, too, that the
ession of Health can speak with power in matters
nmorality and intemperance in those regions of
il and individual misadjustment in which the
armony is the direct or indirect result of a de-
;ure from a temperate or moral mode of life,
[oreover, the conspiracy of silence which now en-
ps the whole subject of sex responsibilities and
177 N

THE GREAT STATE

sex morality must be cleared away, and it will be the
duty of the Health adviser to co-operate with the
educationist in dispelling ignorance about normal sex
functions, and in pointing out the harmful results of
immoral conduct in ruined health and in diminished
efficiency. The work of the State doctor will be
preventive rather than curative, national as weU as
individual, and educational in a high degree. He it
is who will act as guide and counsellor in the coming
transition period in the history of the human race,
which is now approaching much more quicMy than
many suppose. For mankind is passing out of the
control of its old schoolmaster, Natural Selection, and
is entering on the wider career of adult life, when the
old evolutionary landmarks will be lost sight of,
when preadaptation and instinctive response will be
largely supplemented by capacity to profit by ex-
perience, and when the power of controlling his en-
vironment will enable man to take a large share in
the shaping of Human destiny. Those who are
called upon to advise the race in these great issues
must be public-spirited citizens above all suspicion
of self-seeking. Such public spirit as we need de-
mands public service and public recognition; it will
flourish in an atmosphere of penetrating criticism
efficiently performed, it will languish under condi-
tions both of unrestricted competition and of re-
stricted activity. It perishes in a life of unlimited
self-assertion and uncontrolled individualism.
The uncertainty and the obscurity which have in

i7«

I^LTH AND HEALING IN THE GREAT STATE

past hung about the methods of the Healer in
treatment of disease in the individual citizen
cling to his reputation and prejudice his author-
now that he is called upon to act as the adjuster
sreen the social organism and its environment,
this will rapidly disappear with wider knowl-
3 and increasing experience on his part, and with
road sustaining collective intelligence and criti-
1 behind and penetrating his specialised authority.
;his much we may be quite certain, that it is only
he Healing Profession responds to the call which
be made upon it by Society for instruction and
lance in the important field of race culture, only
fc concerns itself with the causes and the preven-
. of disease in childhood, in prenatal and germinal
only as it rises to the full measiu-e of its respon-
lities to the Race and to future generations — only
t does these things can it claim to save society
a internal decay, as it now claims to protect it
a those external factors which produce disease,
/hen adequately remunerated and thoroughly
;ient medical treatment and advice are secured
3very citizen, when the unessentials have been
; aside and the energy now expended in the
,tment of symptoms and on attempts to neu-
ise the effects of disease is directed to the detec-
i and the removal of its cause, when Society
erstands that amateur attempts to apply un-
aed methods in dealing with disease are bound
:ail, when the State recognises the wisdom of
179

THE GREAT STATE

following the well-considered advice, as well as con-
sulting the mature opinion of skilled advisers in
matters relating to the health of this and the next
generation, when the Profession of Healing itself
recognises that it exists for the purpose of bringing
Society into more harmonious adaptation to its
environment and that its only legitimate demands
must be for freedom, encouragement, sympathetic
understanding, and opportunity to carry on its work
of healing under such conditions of service as will
lead to greater efficiency on the part of its own
members, and greater benefits to the community
which it serves, then, and not till then, will the
Science and practice of Medicine be worthy of
the Great State; and then, and not till then, will
the Great State fully recognise the usefulness and the
worth of its Health Service.

.AW AND THE GREAT STATE

BY E. S. P. HAYNES

VI

LAW AND THE GREAT STATE

Law no less can be said than that her seat is the bosom
, her voice the harmony of the world. — Hooker.

IS eloquent sentence is scarcely likely to find
:ho in modem sentiment. In our world of
y law has associations of terror for the poor,
ancial jeopardy for the rich, of richly confused
ition for the lawyer. Law makes little or no
il either to the collective intelligence or to the
tive affections of the community. The law,
pular estimation, is a "hass." In the estima-
)f a growing minority it is (as administered by
rn bureaucracy) simply a brutal bully, whose
rention must be avoided at any cost, or an
earing sharper extremely difficult to evade,
i is stiU, perhaps, for many minds a certain
cal glamour about it. The ordinary man who
; make an inte lectual effort to understand the
ngs of his household cisterns or sanitary ar-
ments would as often as not flinch from in-
;ating all the possible complications of his own
To some extent this is inevitable. In a high-
dlised community lega' machinery cannot be
183

THE GREAT STATE

simpler than any other machinery, though, of course,
it should not be more complicated than other machin-
ery, if such a state of things can be avoided. Again
there is an inevitable tendency to make judges the
mouthpieces of our virtuous indignation. AU vul-
gar people love to hear a good scolding properly
applied. Many men who resent a peremptory
summons, reeking of pains and penalties, to serve
on a jury, feel that society is not altogether rotten
when they read:

"The Judge then assumed the black cap and addressed the
prisoner as follows: 'John Jones, you have been convicted of
a dastardly murder by an impartial jury of your countrymen,
and the sentence of the Court is that you be taken from this
Court . . . and hanged by the neck till you be dead, and God
have mercy on your soul.'""

This gratifies all the lingering nitrsery morality
in the common man, and it is none the less pleasing
to him that the Judge s attired in a costume ex-
clusively associated with the pronouncement of
doom, and is, therefore, invested with a kind of
halo, or, as more irreverent persons might say, a
kind of tabooing power. The Judge would not be
felt to be "voicing' the community if, wearing or-
dinary morning dress, he said, merely:

"Mr. Jones, the legal consequence of the foreman's re-
marks is that, unless you succeed in persuading the Court of
Appeal to quash the conviction or unless you obtain a reprieve
from the Home Secretary, you will be executed as the law directs.
I do not wish to intrude into the question of your religious

184

LAW AND THE GREAT STATE

ns, but, if you desire it, the chaplain shall wait upon

rour solicitor and your intimate friends are at your ser-

uid you shall have every opportunity of settling your

in a manner as satisfactory as this unfortunate occasion

ts."

) doubt, however, the judges and lawyers of the
t State will feel it less incumbent on them to
)duce the violence and fierceness of the past

they do now. The modern parent can bring
;hildren without incessantly flourishing a big
, and it is time the law came up a little nearer
le present level of civilisation. . . .

this connection it is instructive to remember
)oliteness of the Athenians. Readers of Plato's
lo will remember the civility of the executioner
Derates when he presented the hemlock and
ly explained how it would work. This is quite
dvance on pinioning and blindfolding the vic-
or preventing him forcibly from committing
ie. On the one hand one observes barbaric
t and a brutish vindictiveness, on the other
;nified appeal to human dignity and citizenship

in a criminal condemned. Still more startling
odem not'ons is Socrates's expression of attach-
; to the laws of Athens when Crito urges him
icape. To Socrates the laws appear almost as
dly deities who have watched over him from
cradle, and whom he is bound by the ob-
ion of past benefits not to defy. Mr. Zim-
i explains this attitude very well in the mas-
i8s

THE GREAT STATE

terful chapter on "Law" in his Greek Common-
wealth}

"We have our Constitution written or unwritten and the
ever-changing body of our Statute Law. But they are remote
from our daily life. We do not ourselves enforce them or
even know them. . . . Between us and the enforcement of law
stand the policeman and the magistrate: between us and the
making of law stand ParUaments and the government. But
in Athens there was no such thing as the 'government' as
distinct from the people."

There, perhaps, Mr. Zimrtiem puts his hand upon
the essential difference in spirit between that an-
cient civilisation and our present confusion. Our
modern States — and, so far as the law goes, this is
true even of the American repubHc — derive from
bullying monarchs, bullying dukes and earls and
barons who bullied their tenants and so down; and
we have an enormous traditional incubus of Vile
aggressions to shake off before the Great State will
be able to emulate the fine nobility of those ancient
cities. It must, moreover, be noted that a mere
replacement of feudalism by a sham democratic
bureaucracy is not likely to give us any great in-
crease of sweetness and Hght in our courts — or else-
where. The spirit of bureaucracy is to distinguish
between the official and the citizen, and it is typical
of this that the London trams are labelled "L. C. C,"
and that the notices in the public parks are signed
"By Order L. C. C." — showing that these things are

' The Creek Commonwealth, p. 125. (Clarendon Press, 1911.)

1 86

LAW AND THE GREAT STATE

not the property of the people of London, but of a
select and forttinate body of adventurers in control
This is quite alien from the magnificent inscription
of "Sv P. Q. R." of the Roman banner.

But in the Great State the tram and the post
notices will say, and not only say but mean, "This
belongs to the Londoners," and the mail-cart or
railway signal wiU say, "This mail-cart or rail-
way signal belongs to the Englishmen"; so, when
the prisoner stands in front of the judge, that
judge wiU not only be, but also appear, a reason-
able civil gentleman instead of a Minos in minia-
ture.

Such a state of things as Mr. Zimmem describes,
of course, necessitated a rotation of citizens in dif-
ferent offices; there were no "officials" because
every one had office in turn; the ordinary Athenian
citizen was personally familiar with both judicial
and legislative work. Such a participation is abso-
lutely necessary for a civilised relation between the
law and the ordinary man. The requisite leisure
of the Athenian citizen, no doubt, reposed on a
fotmdation of slave labour; in the Great State
it will rest on a foundation o^power-increasing ma-
chinery. The essential point is for every citizen
to regard justice and legislation as part of his own
work, and the whole apparatus of the State as his
possession, instead of as alien things imposed on
him by such persons as cabinet ministers and judges.
Such an achievement can only spring from a new

187

THE GREAT STATE

harmony between law and custom, order and free-
dom, and from a local connection in whatever re-
mains localised. I do not mean that such localisa-
tions need necessarily be those of an agricultural
community or the Normal Social Life. I am speak-
ing of local units of thought and administration.
The unit may be that of a township or coimty, but
clearly much law arising out of local matters must
be administered throughout a number of distributed
circles, and cannot be too rigidly centralised. Now,
the citizenship of the ancient civilised state was
destroyed just in so far as the feudal military system
crushed out civic life, and the feudal or territorial
units of justice were in turn crushed out by the
centralisation of justice as the bigger States of
Europe came to birth in the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries. Modem citizenship was scarcely likely
to flourish in what Mr. Wells calls the "jerry-built
nationalities" of the last fifty years, or, even where
the nationality already existed, in the welter of
the industrial revolution.

The law of the Great State should, therefore, not
be too highly centralised, and should leave rooms
under its catholic universality for local, and not
merely local, but a certain kind of specialised Justice.
Much admirable work is done by Commercial Court
judges and by magistrates paid and tmpaid. By
"specialised Justice" I mean the kind of work that
is done by the Commercial Court or, on a' smaller
scale, by the Incorporated Law Society's Discipline

LAW AND THE GREAT STATE

mittee or any Court Martial. I believe that
Great State will develop wide extensions of
alised justice. Subject to the right of appeal,
;r justice can generally be obtained from men

are well acquainted with the subject-matter
•e them. Jtuies often make hideous blunders
ivil actions concerning complicated business
rs of which they know nothing. "Judicial
ranee" has become a proverbial phrase. But,

the defeated litigant to appeal from an expert
•t of first instance, the subject-matter would

been already well cooked and served up for
)urely legal mind.

lere is, in all litigation, a curious little conflict
een reality and the apparatus that has to deal

it. There is a struggle bfetween the issue and
jrocess. What the lawyer wants is the simpli-
on of facts; what the layman wants is the
lification of law. The layman often has a touch-
lelief in the utility of codes because he is unaware

foreign codes are interpreted largely in the

of past litigation about them. A code cannot
;ether do away with the difficulty of forcing

into the strait-waistcoat of legal definition.
t can be done, however, is to increase statutes
;he Partnership Act, 1890, which summarise and
down a multitude of decided cases. If our
prudence is to justify the maxim "Ignorantia

neminem excusat, " then it must be thoroughly
E against Bentham's amplification, "Ignorance
189

THE GREAT STATE

of the law excuses no one except the lawyer." If it
is to adopt the old eqtiity motto "No wrong without
a remedy," then it must be so framed and so made
acceptable to the general understanding that no
wronged citizen can fail to be conscious that he has
at least some sort of remedy. It should not be
impossible so to simplify the law in its elementary
stages that the necessarily abstruse points are only
those which have to be decided in the Courts of
Appeal.

Decisions of a court of first instance are accepted
as final more often from the litigant's disinclination
to gamble than from his thinking that the decision
is irrefutable in itself. Such a simplification as I
have suggested could be achieved by a series of
statutes which (a) boil down and clarify the case
law of each preceding twenty years and (b) boil down
and clarify the crude, or perhaps experimental,
legislation on any given subject during the same
period, much as excellent soup may be made out
of bones. In some such fashion the lawyer would
find his facts more readily pigeonholed in advance,
and the layman would find his law less difficult to
assimilate. I do not see why there should not be
some special department of the public service of
the Great State engaged continually in this process
<rf stewing a sort of legal stockpot for legislative
stuff.

If one development is more certain than another
in the future, it is the unification of international

190

LAW AND THE GREAT STATE

on matters concerning marriage, divorce, suc-
3n to property, the renvoi, etc. The tests of
inality and residence are bound to supersede
"■ague and inadequate test of domicile to which
United Kingdom and many English-speaking
nimities so obstinately cling. A doctrine
ti grew up in the Dark Ages, when there was no
)nality and but little travelling as we know it
cannot but create the boundless confusion and
rtainty that the doctrine of domicile does at
;nt create in English-speaJdng civiUsation. Even
e Great State be not itself international, the
lopment of an international intelligence must
y end those ridiculous anomalies which perplex
ayman and enrich the lawyer of to-day.
yond these issues I find little to say in the way of
ralisation about the law of the Great State.
. not a Socialist, though I have to admit, with
me men, the manifest necessity of an increasing
Lc control of, and property in, the main social
ces. Clearly the laws of possession must follow
changing ideas of the nature of what is, so to
k, property-able. With the decline of the
aucratic movement, and subject to the fore-
y proviso, it is not unreasonable to expect a
I and successful assimilation of the law of real
erty to the law of personal property instead
5 departmental complication by officials. More-
, the mockery of justice due to the publicity of
proceedings which are worse than useless, except
191

THE GREAT STATE

under conditions of more or less limited privacy,
will presumably cease to exist. I allude more par-
ticularly to cases of blackmail, of divorce, or of
libel and slander. I need not enlarge on the effects
of publicity regarding blackmail or divorce, but
I may add that the pubhcity of libel and slander
proceedings often denies relief to all but that par-
ticular class of litigants who seek pectmiary damages
rather than the rehabilitation of character. But
this is a mere obvious step in civilisation that will
be reached long before the Great State can be more
than dawning.

It is difficult to anticipate any particular develop-
ments of the law governing the status of women,
either as dependent or independent of men, when
the whole institution of monogamy, so-called, that
now exists may be fundamentally altered; and the
difficulty is even more formidable in regard to chil-
dren and succession to property. Such matters I
wiU leave to my colleagues with a certain relief.

As to criminals, it is to be hoped that the criminal
law of the Great State will be of as little immediate
consequence to the citizen of the Great State as
it is to the well-to-do citizen of to-day. As Hobbes
well puts it:

"Every Sovereign ought to cause Justice to be taught, which
(consisting in taking from no man what is his) is as much as
to say, to cause men to be taught not to deprive their neighbours,
by violence or fraud, of anything which by the sovereign au-
thority is theirs."

192

LAW AND THE GREAT STATE

To this most men are ready enough to subscribe.
Our criminal law, a pectiliar blend of barbaric violence,
medieval prejudices, and modern fallacies, affects
only the more or less submerged portion of the com-
munity, whose semi-starvation not only of material
comforts, but also of all the higher pleasures that
make life worth living, will presumably not continue
in the Great State. Where a citizen has every-
thing to lose by violence — to wit, his reputation, his
earning power, his liberty — ^where can the inducement
to violence exist? By robbery he actually risks the
loss of what he can honestly earn, and he is not
likely to rob unless he is a collector — ^from whom no
man is safe — or actuated by some mania for the
acquisition of property on a large scale. And as
for murder and such like offences, they are nowa-
days far more often the results of the economic
pressure tmder which we live than of any innate
evil in men. It is merely silly to kill a wife or con-
cubine when there are means to divorce the one or
to make decent provision for the other. The want
of these things manufactures fifty per cent, of our
murderers. It is equally absurd to kill an illegiti-
mate child if its birth does not pillory the mother
so that her earning power is reduced exactly in
proportion to her necessity for more. There again
is a class of offence for which the Great State will
leave no inducement. Again, there is a large cate-
gory of crimes demanding medical rather than
legal treatment.

193 o

THE GREAT STATE

In the end I conceive that the Great State will
have little more to consider in the way of crime
than those inevitable clashes of jealousy, the Crimes
of Passion. Sordid crime toII disappear; only ro-
mantic crime will remain.

1. I mean something far more drastic than the
statute revision that is going on to-day, and the recent
suppression of discussion in the House of Commons
removes the old obstacles to symmetrical reform.

2. Even romantic crimes are peculiar to men or
women of no wide intellectual interests or recrea-
tions who by reason of their limitations cannot shake
off the obsession of a particular person or a fixed idea.

To write on the problem of the law in the Great
State is as difficiilt as to describe a strange coimtry
seen from an aeroplane. Only the crudest outlines
emerge; all the essential characteristics of colour
and scheme and detail remain gray and blurred.
I sketch only what I can see. Yet, though it may be
difficult to discern a celestial city, the Great State
wiU at least avoid "mistaking memories for hopes,"
to adopt Hallam's famous sentence about the states-
men of medieval Italy. I mean that the Law of the
Great State will be untrammelled by memories of
the golden age or a state of Nature; it will seek no
inspiration from imaginary theodicies or pedigrees;
it will be inviolate by greed or superstition. That
Law may, perhaps, in sober fact embody and pro-
claim the harmony of a better world.

194

DEMOCRACY AND THE GREAT STATE

BY CECIL CHESTERTON

VII
DEMOCRACY AND THE GREAT STATE

All free men feel that the only tolerable condi-
tion of Government is Democracy. No such man
will tolerate the compulsory direction of his actions
by any temporal authority save the general will of
his fellow-citizens. This great truism I shall assume
as the foundation of all that I have to say in this
essay. With those who do not feel its truth, with
those who regard a Hereditary Aristocracy or mere-
ly the Rich or Experts or Men in Advance of their
Age as the proper repositories of political power I
shall not here argue. I will argue with them when
they have answered the plain question of the Jesuit
Suarez, "If sovereignty is not in the People, where
is it?"

Democracy, then, we assume as the fundamental
condition of the state of society which we desire to
create; but it is of vital importance to have in our
minds a clear and unalterable idea of what Democ-
racy means. Democracy means Government by
the General Will. That is to say, it means that
such laws as the mass of the population approves
are passed and enforced, while such laws as are

197

THE GREAT STATE

obnoxious to the mass of the population are rejected.
It is clear that this has on the face of it nothing to
do with special devices such as representation, by
which modem men have attempted to achieve the
end of Democracy. Despotic institutions, heredi-
tary rulers, and representative bodies must alike be
judged from the democratic standpoint by whether
they do or do not result in a system of Government
which accords with the general will of the people.
Democracy, considered in this sense, is not a new
thing (as our Modems suppose), but just about the
oldest thing in the world. In what Mr. Wells has
christened "The Normal Social Life" practical
Democracy has always prevailed in the matters
which most deeply affect the ordinary existence of
the common man. Now and then, no doubt, a far-off
ruler not chosen by him might force the common
man to take part in a war which was not of his
making. Taxes not levied with his consent would
occasionally be imposed upon him. But in the
matters that concern his daily life, in his sowing
and reaping, in his buying and selling, in his marry-
ing, in the bearing and upbringing of his children,
in his religion, and in all other things for which such
a man normally cares, his actions would be regulated
by the customs of his tribe or commune, and any
disputes would be settled by a council of his neigh-
bours. That is to say, these matters would be settled
by the general will. He would be living, whether he
knew it or not, under the conditions of Democracy.

198

DEMOCRACY AND THE GREAT STATE

Now in this, as in other matters, what we must
seek to effect is a return to what is wholesome and
natural to Man in the Normal Social Life while
availing ourselves of the advantages which a more
elaborate system of society affords us. We must
seek vmder the conditions imposed by the growth of
larger States and the consequent necessity of a more
extensive political organisation to obtain that which
is obtained so easily in a simple society by the meet-
ing of villagers under a tree.

The matter is the more urgent because so long
as our system of government remains essentially
undemocratic every step in the direction of Collec-
tivism will be a step away from Democracy. It is
no use denying that the "permeation" of our poli-
ticians and others with what are called "Socialist"
ideas has tended, up to the present, rather to dimin-
ish than to increase the power of the General Will.
Not only have measures directed towards the regimen-
tation of the poor and tending, not to Collectivism,
but to the Servile State been rushed through under
the inspiring title of "Social Reform," but even
where the direct Nationalisation of capital was in-
volved the rich have known how to turn the Col-
lectivist philosophy to their use. An example at
once deplorable and farcical may be found in the
extraordinary history of the National Telephone
Company, whose monopoly was first secretly created
and then ostentatiously bought (at an exorbitant
price) by "the Nation" — that is, by the politicians,

199

J. ±X±JJ \J A.'^dJdd. i. X VJ ^J.XJ. ^-d

some of whom had also been (Jirectors. I can con-
ceive no state of society — not even a frank plutocracy
— more odious than one in which the governing class
held all the economic power and administrated
everything, nominally on behalf of the public,
really on their own. And that plutocratic Collec-
tivism is an extremely likely end to the efforts of a
generation of Socialists, tm.less the machinery of the
State can be made really to reflect the General Will.

The method by which most modem societies have
attempted to solve the problem of Democracy is
the method of Representation. Since it is obviously
impossible that all the members of a great modem
Nation, still more of the larger federations of men
which the future will probably see, to meet together
in one place, and there to discuss all the details of
jKjlitical administration, it is thought that the
same end might be achieved if certain groups of
such men delegated their power to some person
chosen by them who should have their authority
to speak in their name.

Now it is clear that the success of this experiment
depends essentially upon the exact correspondence
between the actions of the delegate and the wishes
of those from whom his authority is derived. I say
this is clear to any one who has attempted to think
out the problem of representation. It is apparently
by no means clear to a great many writers in the
press or to a great many speakers on political
platforms. These people are forever drawing aii en-

200

DEMOCRACY AND THE GREAT STATE

tirely meaningless distinction between "a Dele-
gate" and what they call "a Representative."
What this distinction means I have never been able
to conceive. A man must vote either according to
the wishes of his constituents or against those
wishes. If he does the former he is acting as a
faithful delegate woxild act. If he does the latter, he
is neither a delegate nor a representative. He is an
Oligarch. For how can we say that a man "repre-
sents" Slociim when he is in the habit of saying
"Aye" where the inhabitants of Slocum would, if
consulted, say "No"?

Now it is pretty obvious to most of us that, in
England at any rate, there is absolutely no such
relation as I have predicated as essential between
the "Representative" and the people he is supposed
to "represent." With the special causes which make
this divorce more complete in England than else-
where I shall have to deal in a moment. But apart
from those special causes there is that in the very
nature of the Representative System which tends
to render it unrepresentative. In England to-day
the Member of Parliament is not really in any sense
chosen by his constituents. But even if he were
so chosen it would still be true that the very fact of
his having been marked out from his fellow-citizens
for special governmental functions would give him
a point of view which would not be quite an acciorate
mirror of the mind of those fellow-citizens. Put
him in a room with several hundred other men

201

ina (jrJMiAJ. 01J\lJli

similarly marked out from their fellow-citizens, and
this psychological result is indefinitely intensified.
It has always been so with political assemblies,
however democratic their constitution, and in all
probability it always will be so with them.

The divorce between the Politician and the Citizen
is, of course, enormously increased when the former
takes to politics as a profession.

The Professional Politician is the dominant figure
in the Government of all civilised countries to-day,
and nowhere is he more dominant than in England,
where a large number of innocent persons refuse to
believe in his existence.

That Politics should become a profession was
perhaps inevitable so soon as the government of
the country was no longer the affair of the citizens
themselves. At any rate, in all known periods
after politics had emerged from the primitive con-
dition of the village community the Professional
Politician has existed.

I shall discuss later how far he can be eliminated,
but while he exists the important thing is to recog-
nise that he does exist, to recognise that in all
Nations which have developed to the point to which
England has developed a class has appeared of
men who make the government of the people their
ordinary means of livelihood.

In moments of high civic excitement it has some-
times been possible to conduct the affairs of state
without the payment of Politicians. This was so,

202

DEMOCRACY AND THE GREAT STATE

for example, in the high hope and anger of the
French Revolution. Then men entered politics
urged by a passionate desire for social justice and
a passionate patriotism, and left Politics (sometimes
by the Tumbrils) poorer than they were in the first
instance. It is doubtfiil whether, in any case, such
self-devotion could be made permanent in times of
comparative quiescence. But one thing is certain:
with this intense self-devotion to the common weal
inevitably goes an instinct that Politicians should
be poor men. The great and determining char-
acters in the revolutionary drama of France boasted
that while they administered millions they them-
selves lodged in the cheapest lodgings and dined
at the cheapest restaurants.

Nothing could be more absurd than the present
practice in England, the practice, I mean, of reward-
ing success in politics with salaries varying from £ i , 2 oo
to £10,000 a year, and then pretending that these
sums are of no accoimt at all to the persons who
receive them. Such a practice directly tends to
produce corruption of the worst kind. A Pro-
fessional Politician may be, like a Professional
House-Agent, a perfectly honest man — that is, he
may endeavour to give in return for his salary honest
and efficient service to the State. But we all know
what would happen if it were a general assumption,
which it was "in bad taste" to challenge, that House-
Agents were entirely indifferent to their fees and
were actuated solely by compassion for persons who

203

± xxx:/ \jjs.rujr\ JL o j. m. jl>

found themselves for the moment homeless and by
a desire to see them adequately housed. Such a.
general assumption would be used by really dis-
honest house-agents to cover their offences, while
the honest house-agent, working, no doubt, for
money but fairly earning it, would find himself
handicapped. And that is exactly the condition
of English Politics to-day. \

Politics in England, and largely throughout the
civilised world, are for the most part a means of-
livelihood for those who concern themselves with
them. No doubt it is true that a large number of
men enter the House of Commons without any in-
tention of increasing their income, some from vanity
and the desire for an honorary distinction, some
(very few) with a desire to express their personal
views, and here and there (the rarest thing of all)
a man determined to voice the opinions of his con-
stituency. But these are not the men who direct
Parliament or really determine the Government
of the Country. The men who do this are the Pro-
fessional Politicians.

These may be broadly divided into two classes.
There are the men who belong by birth to what we
may call the governing class. These are considered
to have a right to co-option into salaried political
posts. It is to them that Mr. BeUoc's amusing
poem refers:

"It happened to Lord Lundy then,
As happens to so many men,
204

DEMOCRACY AND THE GREAT STATE

About the age of twenty-six
They shoved him into PoUtics.
In which profession he commanded
The salaries his rank demanded."

This is on the whole the most harmless and least
corrupt kind of professionalism in politics. Such
men are apprenticed to politics as a profession (that
is, as a means of making money) just as men of
humbler rank are apprenticed to be Solicitors,
Greengrocers, or Compositors, because their parents
happen to be able to command for them an opening
in these trades. Such men, if they happen to be
honest men, often try to do their best to earn their
money by serving the community to the best of
their ability. This method of choosing governors
is repugnant to Democracy, but is not clearly re-
pugnant to plain morals or to the national interest.
It is the method by which all oligarchical States are
governed. It was the method by which England
was governed during the eighteenth and the greater
part of the nineteenth century.

A much worse form of Political Professionalism
has arisen of late years. Young men, conscious
perhaps of some talent, enter Parliament with the
deliberate intention of getting a salaried place from
those at whose disposal such places and salaries
are placed. • Such a man violates, of course, the
essential idea of representation as it has been out-
lined above. His intention is not to serve his
constituency, but to serve those from whom he

205

THE GREAT STATE

expects his pecuniary reward — ^that is, the very-
Executive which he is supposed to check and crit-
icise. If a sufficient number of such men are re-
turned to the representative assembly, it is obvious
that such an assembly will exist only to ratify the
decisions of the Executive; that is to say, from the
democratic point of view, it will not exist at all.
And that practically is the state of the case at the
present time.

Men — that is, the men that count — enter Parlia-
ment with an eye to a professional career. This
career can only be obtained by leave of the small
co-opted group which constitutes "the Government"
and "the Official Opposition" — that is, those who,
though not at the moment in receipt of public
money, expect to receive it when a change of govern-
ment shall take place. He knows very well that
certain votes and speeches will hurt his chances of
ever making any money in politics, while certain
other votes and speeches will help him to do so.
Naturally, like any other man pursuing his trade,
he desires to ingratiate himself with his customer;
and he speaks and votes accordingly. Add to this
the fact that in England the Executive has the power
at any moment of ordering a dissolution of Parlia-
ment, that Elections are very expensive, that only
very rich men can afford to finance their own can-
didatures, that a vast secret fund exists to finance
such candidatures, and that this fund is readily
placed at the disposal of those — and of those only —

206

DEMOCRACY AND THE GREAT STATE

who are ready to act as the subservient retainers
of the successful professionals, and you have an
adequate explanation of the undemocratic character
of English politics to-day.

I have already said that it is dubious whether we
can ever dispense altogether with the, Professional
Politicians under ordinary conditions. But one
thing is clear. If Politics are to remain a profession,
that profession must in the public interest be most
strictly safeguarded. That is to say, every ternp-
tation to which the politician may be subjected to
act against the interest of those who employ him
must be most carefully provided against; and any
disposit on on his part to prefer his private interests
to his duty of obedience to the general will must
be immediately and rigorously punished. It is
to this end that I now propose to devote some
consideration.

One necessity stands out manifest and incontro-
vertible. If politics are to be a'pToiession,the profession
of Executive Administrator must bekept strictly separate
from the profession of Delegate to the Legislature. If
this is not so, the Legislature can never in the nature
of things be really independent of the Executive,
and can, therefore, never really act as an effective
check upon it. Every member of the Legislature
body win be on the lookout for the more profitable
administrative posts. These posts wiU of necessity
be in the gift of the Executive. They will neces-
sarily be bestowed upon those of whose conduct the

207

THE GREAT STATE

Executive approves. The Executive will naturally
approve of the conduct of those who do not oppose
or even criticise it. Therefore there will be (as
in fact there is to-day) an immense pressure upon
members of the Representative Body not to act in
a representative fashion, but rather to use all the
power and influence they possess to support, not those
who have elected them, but those from whom they
expect benefits.

It is obvious that in any state of society some one
or other must be intrusted with the business of
practical executive administration. It is equally
obvious that no man can reasonably be expected to
take on such a task as a mere hobby. He must be
paid for it; it must be his means of livelihood, in a
word, his profession. To that there is, in the ab-
stract, no more objection than there is to the pro-
fession of Doctor, House-Agent, or Butcher, pro-
vided always that the employer of such a man —
i. e., the Community — has as full a control over him
as a man has over the tradesmen he employs. A
butcher does not supply you with such meat as he
may think will suit your health or personal efficiency,
but with such meat as you demand. So long as the
expert administrator confines himself to endeavour-
ing to satisfy his clients as the butcher does and
makes no pretence to an authority superior to that
of his clients, he is harmless and may be exceedingly
useful. It is impossible to deny that the details of
administration in a modem state are so complex that

208

DEMOCRACY AND THE GREAT STATE

the sheer routine work of administration does, and
must, involve a degree of special knowledge to which
the ordinary citizen cannot and would not choose
to attain. So does the trade of a bootmaker. I
cannot make a pair of boots. I have to ask a boot-
maker to make them for me. But — and this is the
essential point — I am the judge of the pair of boots
when made: if they do not fit me I reject them and
dismiss my bootmaker. I am in no way deterred
from following this course by the assurance that
the bootmaker is "an expert" or that he is "more
advanced" than I, or by any other of the pretences
by which oligarchy is being once more foisted upon
the people.

The great problem, then, is that of the control of
the necessary professional administrator by the
General Will. It is, I admit, an exceedingly difficult
problem, and for the present I can see no solution
save the old expedient of a representative assembly —
defective as I know that expedient to be. I have
often wondered whether some one would not one
day hit upon a method of extending to general
politics the much more really democratic method
of the Common Jury. I have often had a fancy, for
example, for a Second Chamber constituted upon
that principle — a name chosen by lot from the voting
list cf every constituency, attendance to be com-
pulsory, and a reasonable and equal remuneration to
be granted to every person compelled to attend.
I am quite confident that such a chamber would

209 p

THE GREAT STATE

represent the General Will a great deal better than
either the House of Lords or the House of Commons
has done in the past, and would make very short
work (to the great satisfaction of the mass of the
population) of much legislation that has passed with
ease and with "the consent of all parties" through
our present Parliament.

But I do not pretend to have any such scheme
ready for practical advocacy; and so for the present
we must rest content with the representative system,
doing, at the same time, all that we can to prevent
its abuse, to mitigate its inevitable failings, and,
above all, to keep it continually controlled by the
direct expression of the General Will.

Let us first draw as clear a distinction as we can
between the inevitable defects of representation and
the accidental evils to which it does make it quite
intolerable in this country.

Take the latter first.

In England to-day representative government
suffers from two prime evils. First, the representa-
tive assembly is not independent of the executive,
and therefore cannot control it. Secondly, it is not
freely chosen by the people, nor does it derive its
effective mandate from the people; but its composi-
tion is selected and its programme devised by those
very professional politicians upon whose actions it
is supposed to exist as a check.

I have already adumbrated my view of the first
necessary step in dealing with the former of the

2IO

DEMOCRACY AND THE GREAT STATE

two evils. The members of the representative as-
sembly should in no case whatsoever be allowed to
become administrators paid by the Executive. Let
them be paid, by all means, for the services they
render as representatives to the people by the people
whom they represent, and let the people who pay
them see that they are really represented. But let
them all be paid exactly alike, whether they support
or oppose the Executive, and let there be a strict
rule that no one shall within, say, ten years of sitting
in the legislature receive public money in any form
from the Executive. In that case, if commercial
motives enter in any way into their calculations, they
will find that their interest Ues primarily in standing
well with their constituents. Their constituents can
deprive them of their salaries; the "Government"
cannot. On the lowest motive, therefore, it will be
better for them to please those who elect them than
those whom they are elected to control.

What, then, will become of "the Ministry"? It
will disappear. The professional head of a depart-
ment — strictly excluded from the assembly — will
remain. The popular assembly elected to control
that permanent head will remain. Probably the
assembly will find it convenient to divide itself into
Committees for this purpose, though such Commit-
tees should have no more than investigatory and
advisory powers. The decision must rest with the
assembly itself. But the "Minister" — ^that is, the
Professional Politician who has entered Parliament

211

THE GREAT STATE

by pretending to represent some body of electors
and has consented for a salary not to represent them,
but to represent instead the Caucus that pays him —
for him the new Democracy will have no use.

But when you have liberated the Representative
Assembly from the control of that little group of
Professional Politicians which is commonly called
"The Government," but which I have always pre-
ferred to designate more accurately as "The Two
Front Benches," you have not, therefore, necessarily
made it really responsible to the people. That is,
you have not achieved Democracy. It must be in-
sisted upon again that, though the present political
regime in England intensifies all the evils and
dangers of Representative Government while de-
priving it of all its uses, yet there are evils, there are
dangers which are not created by the regime, and
which would not necessarily cease with the overthrow
of that regime. They are found in America and
elsewhere where that particular regime is tmknown.
They are inherent in the nature of Representative
Institutions themselves. Every body of men cut off
from the ordinary life of their fellow-citizens and
vested with special powers tends, tinless popularly
controlled, to become an Oligarchy. We can see both
in history and at the present time examples of as-
semblies internally free but irresponsible, and govern-
ing according to their own interests or prejudices,
without regard to popular mandate. The Grand
Council of Venice was such an assembly, and the

212

DEMOCRACY AND THE GREAT STATE

English House of Commons in the eighteenth cen-
tury; to a certain extent the French Chamber is
such to-day.

Against this peril the only real security is a
vigilant and instructed popular opinion. With such
an opinion always goes an extreme distrust of the
representative, a feeling that he will always cheat
you if he can, and a determination that he shall not
be allowed to do so. Walt Whitman saw very far
indeed into the truth when he set down as one of
the conditions of his ideal State that the people
should be "always ready to rise up against the
never-ending audacity of Elected Persons."

The chief change needed, then, is, it must be ad-
mitted, a change in the popular psychology. Never-
theless, there are changes in machinery which would
be the necessary accompaniments of such a change,
and which may do a great deal to make it easier.
And here I come to methods which the peculiar
independence of the several States of the Union has
already enabled America to put to the test, in cer-
tain cases, upon which an American writer may be
better qualified to write than myself.

Chief among these is the re-creation of the elec-
toral unit as a thing capable of political initiative.
What I mean is this We say that Slocum sent Sir
Josiah Gudge to Parliament to carry out a certain
"programme." As a matter of fact, Slocum had
nothing to do either with choosing Sir Josiah or
with framing his programme. It could have noth-

213

THE GREAT STATE

ing to do with either as things stand even if the
special corruption incidental to the English political
system was removed, for Slocum has no organised
and articulate political existence. In a word, it
has no initiative, and has to take its programme
from Sir Josiah, and Sir Jpsiah from whatever
Unknown Powers may have decreed his candidature.
It is obvious that if we are to have democracy this
state of things must be ended. Whatever body of
men elect, our representatives must be organised for
collective action, must be articulate, must be ca-
pable of framing their own demands, of choosing,
controlling, and, if need be, ptmishing their ser-
vants.

I am inclined to think that it will eventually be
found that a better system of representation can be
obtained by representing men by their guilds or
trades rather than by their localities. The geo-
graphical method of election really dates back to a
time when small local units, stiU essentially in the
phase of the Normal Social Life, had a natural
homogeneity. They have no such homogeneity
to-day. The State no longer consists of a collection
of village communes; nor is the type of State the
government of which we are here discussing con-
ceived as being organised in such a fashion. But
the State must always consist of groups of citizens
co-operating for certain necessary social ptirposes,
and it is to the Guilds, which will naturally, under
a system of co-operative production, spring up

214

DEMOCRACY AND THE GREAT STATE

throughout industrial worlds, that I should look to
find the Electoral Unit of the future.

I do not wish to trespass upon the subject of in-
dustrial organisation, which is dealt with in this
volume by other and abler pens; but it is so essential
to Democracy that the Electing Body should be one
with large powers of control over its own affairs
that I should be very glad to see these Guilds in-
vested with considerable powers of self-government
imder the general supervision of the National Ex-
ecutive. Of course, it would not do to give the
coal-miners, for example, irresponsible control of the
coal-fields. The coal-fields must be national prop-
erty; on that we agree. But I do not see why all
details of management, such matters as the hours
of labour, provision against accident, and the like,
should not be settled directly by the organised
workers concerned. If such powers were vested in
these Guilds, you would start with the immense ad-
vantage, from the democratic point of view, of an
electing body accustomed to debate, to decisive
action, and to the control of its own affairs, which
would be able to thrash out the instructions to be
given to its delegate, and to send him to the repre-
sentative assembly with a real mandate derived
from themselves.

Incidentally it should be remarked that such an
infusion of reality into the operations of the electoral
unit would go far to meet such cases as that of
the United States, where the evils arise, not from the

2IS

THE GREAT STATE

oligarchical control of a small clique, but rather from
the omnipotence of a political Machine subject to
no real popular control. And a further check upon
the development of a two-party system in which
there is no wider alternative than the chances of two
candidates may, perhaps, be foimd in some such
method of voting as Proportional Representation
affords. Of course it is essential that the control of
the Electing Body over the delegates should be
absolute. Two checks on their action would greatly
help to accomplish this.

The first check is the Recall. Not only should
elections be reasonably frequent, but a certain pro-
portion of the Electors should at any time have the
right to demand a general poll on the question of
whether the delegate was or was not carrying out
the mandate of his constituents. Should the vote
go against him, the delegate would have to resign,
and another would be elected in his place. The mere
threat of this action would probably be enough in
most cases to prevent the delegate from shamelessly
and continually violating his trust, as is so often
done to-day.

The second check is the Referendum accompanied
by the Initiative. How powerful a weapon even
under the present degrading political conditions is the
popular pUhiscite may be perceived by noting the
horror with which the Professional Politicians regard
it, and the panic which seized them when one of their
own number was imprudent enough to mention it a

216

DEMOCRACY AND THE GREAT STATE

couple of years ago. But for the Referendum to be
a really effective democratic weapon it must be
capable of being put into force, not merely on the
initiative of the legislature itself or on any section of
it, but on the initiative of a fixed proportion of the
Electors. Indeed, for my part, I am disposed to
think that under the freer political system such as
I have sketched no substantial alteration of the laws
should be passed without a direct appeal to the
popular will. To those who are incapable of looking
beyond the corruptions and futilities of modem
politics such a pronouncement will doubtless seem
absurd. But we are presupposing that those cor-
ruptions and futilities are at an end;, and when they
are at an end there will be no need whatsoever for all
this plethora of legislation which we have come to
think of as something inevitable. When one comes
to consider it in the abstract it is really rather absurd
that a nation should have to keep some six hundred
men busy for nine months in the year at the inter-
minable task of contnuaUy altering its laws. If
just laws can once be established, it is reasonable to
suppose that for some considerable time at any rate
they wiU prove adequate Doubtless from time to
time some unforeseen change in economic or other
conditions may necessitate modifications, but I do
not look forward in the Great State to the unending
legislation of our own time — a legislation which owes
its necessity at best to the need for patching up a
system in process of active decay, and at worst to

217

THE GREAT STATE

the requirements of the Party "Programme" and,
what is much more important, the Party War
Chest No doubt the change from the present basis
of society to a juster and healthier one will mean a
good deal of drastic law-making — and I suspect a
good deal of law-breaking also — ^but, once the change
accomplished, I should expect a vital alteration of the
laws under which citizens are to live to be almost as
rare a thing in the State of the Future as it was in
the settled and happy communities of the past.

Such are a few of the comparatively rough and
crude suggestions that I would make for the demo-
cratic organisation of the State of the future They
pretend to be nothing more than an outline, and even
as an outline they will doubtless require much
modification. Every democ at must feel a certain
disinclination to lay down hard-and-fast conditions
for the future, if only for this reason, that, if his
democratic fa'th be genuine, he desires that the
people should have, not the form of government he
likes, but the form of government they themselves
like. That is what has always made me dislike
answering detailed questions as to how this or that
would be done "under Socialism." I may have
thought of a very ingenious answer, but it does not
follow that it is the answer that my fellow-citizens
will give. And it is for them, not for me, to pro-
nounce the ultimate decision. Securus judical orbis
terrarum.

WOMEN IN THE GREAT STATE

BY CICELY HAMILTON

VIII
WOMEN IN THE GREAT STATE

In forecasting — or rather in making a tentative
endeavour to forecast — the position of woman in
the Great State, one wrestles from the outset with
difficulties; whereof the first and most obstinate
is the practical impossibility, under present condi-
tions, of coming to a definite conclusion as to how
far the traditional and still existing inferiority of
woman — with its resultant dependence, mental and
economic, upon the other sex — is the product of
natural demands and forces, how far the artificial
creation of the class distinctions of the Normal
Social Life. That is to say, of a society which,
for countless generations, has looked upon its
female members merely as the breeding and love-
making class — the wives or mistresses of its male
members and the mothers of its children. It would
be comparatively easy, of course, to latmch out into
a prophecy of inevitable improvement in the posi-
tion of such a class, in the shape of amended condi-
tions of wifehood and motherhood and so forth;
but such considerations would leave the essential
point untouched. Amended conditions and improve-

221

THE GREAT STATE

ments are bound to come; but whether, when they
do come, they raise woman in general to a relatively
higher level in the community than she occupies at
present; whether, when they do come, they endow
her with freedom, real as well as nominal, or leave
her adorned and shackled with comfortable chains,
is a question to which, at the present moment, it
might be rash to return too absolute an answer.
One has hopes, of course, encouraged by the obvious
trend of the Woman's Movement of to-day towards
independence — ^independence at any cost, mental,
economic, and moral, as well as political; but as-
pirations equally fierce and far-reaching have been
stifled before now, and may be stifled again, by the
gift of material benefit. Equitable marriage and
illegitimacy laws, for instance, the endowment of
motherhood, and the prevention of sweating are
quite compatible with continued masculine confu-
sion of the terms "woman" and "wife," and with
continued feminine acquiescence in such masculine
confusion of ideas. A parasite is none the less a
parasite because fed well, housed well, clothed well,
and generally made much of.

If we suppose — as I think we are entitled to
suppose — that the danger I have indicated is in the
end surmounted, and that woman in the Great State
is recognised as an individual with capacities apart
from domesticity, love-making, and child-bearing,
with an existence independent of husband, lover, or
son, her position in the State will, as in the case of the

222

WOMEN IN THE GREAT STATE

male citizen, be determined by two factors — what
the State has the right to demand of her, and- what
she, on her side, as individual and citizen, has the
right and the energy, or power, to demand of the
State. . . . What the State has the right to de-
mand of her will be that she, like her father, her
husband, her brother, shall conduct herself decently
and in accordance with its laws. What it has not
the right to demand of her — either directly or in-
directly, by bribe or by indirect pressiire — ^is that
she, in return for its protection, shall consider
herself under any obligation to produce its future
citizens.

This distinction in the Great State must be made
absolute, clear, and emphatic; since, without it,
the position of woman, however improved mate-
rially, however safeguarded by law, will remain
fundamentally unaltered and fundamentally un-
sound. Unaltered — and therefore, essentially un-
dignified — because perpetuating the hoary but
active tradition that woman does not count except
as a wife and the mother of children; unsound,
because artificially restricting her energies and pos-
sibilities by confining them to the channels of
sexual attraction and reproduction of the race.
Once admit such a principle into the conduct of any
State, however great — the principle that women in
general can deserve well of the social organism not
directly as individuals, as workers and citizens, but
only indirectly through their husbands and the

223

THE GREAT STATE

children they bear them — and you reopen the door
to all the abuses of the past: to the grossest forms
of tyranny and sex dominance on the one side, and,
on the other, to degradation spiritual as well as
bodily.

It is to be hoped that the woman of the near
future will have the power, as she will cer-
tainly have the right, to demand — ^in her own in-
terest as in that of the community at large —
that this distinction shall be made. (For instance,
to take a concrete case, it is to be hoped that she
will be energetic and clear-thinking enough to insist
that such a needful and inevitable measure as the
State Endowment of Motherhood shall not take the
form of a bribe to bear children or an economic
stimulus to her sexual instincts.) I may be wrong;
but, as I see it, the future and progress not only of
womanhood, but of the race in general, depends
largely upon whether or no woman is able to insist
that the satisfaction of her sexual instincts and the
consequent bringing of her children into the world
shall be an entirely voluntary — ^in other words,
an entirely natural — ^proceeding on her part. Until
the satisfaction of these instincts and the consequent
bearing of children do become entirely voluntary,
entirely natural; until no compulsion, social or
economic, drives women into marriage or prosti-
tution, it is practically useless to imagine that you
can really and permanently raise the level of the
mothers of the race. (And in this connection I

224

WOMEN IN THE GREAT STATE

would remind those who still cUng to the belief that
we exist only for sexual attraction and motherhood
that if they are correct in their estimate of the over-
powering strength of our natural instincts, these
natural instincts can surely be left to themselves —
no additional or artificial stimulus being needed in
order to induce us to fill our destiny.)

I may possibly be misunderstood when I say that
the first duty of an enlightened community towards
its women will be to secure to them the right to
refuse marriage and motherhood; but I say it, and
say it with emphasis. The common sense and civic
view of marriage and motherhood is that in them-
selves, and, as far as the community is concerned,
these natural relationships are neither good nor bad,
desirable nor tmdesirable, moral nor immoral; that
whether they are desirable or undesirable, moral or
immoral, depends upon the kind of marriage and the
quality of the parents and their offspring. Any
system that encourages indiscriminate commercial
marriage on the part of women — ^marriage for the
sake of a home or breadwinner, marriage as the only
alternative to the social stigma of spinsterhood, and
the bearing of children for the same reasons — ^is to
be deprecated and, in the Great State, will be depre-
cated as much in the interest of the child as of the
mother. It is, of course, impossible to regulate the
workings of human passion and attraction as you
regulate the workings of a watch; men and women
will mate for foolish, fleeting, and inadequate reasons

22S Q

THE GREAT STATE

as long as the world goes round. But it ought to
be possible to insure that the social system shotdd
not, as it does at present, encourage marriage and
child bearing from mean and inadequate, if entirely
excusable motives; shall not, as it does at present,
force its women into motherhood through the press-
ure of poverty or the insidious cruelty of closing
to them every other avenue to activity and advance-
ment. It ought to be possible for a sane and clear-
thinking society, by the simple process of securing
to women alternative means of livelihood, alternative
careers, to make of marriage for women what mar-
riage for women never yet has been — a voluntary
institution.

The entire question now at issue, not only between
Woman and the State, but between Woman and
Society in general, can be narrowed down to this:
has she, like the other half of the race, a primary,
individual, and responsible existence? or is she what
may be called a secondary being — such value to the
community as she possesses being derivative only
and arising out of her family relations to other
persons? Is she, in short, a personality, or merely
the reproductive faculty personified? ... So far —
roughly speaking and allowing for a certain number
of exceptions — she has counted in the world's history
and progress in the secondary sense only; as the
personification of the reproductive faculty, as wife,
as mistress, and as mother of sons. It remains to be
seen whether she is able to establish and maintain a

226

WOMEN IN THE GREAT STATE

right to cotint as an actual personality, an individual
and direct member of the social organism. That
right, once established, would bring with it inevitably
the further right to select her own manner of living
as freely as a man does; and to resent legislative or
other attempts to induce her to support herself or
serve the State in one particular fashion, legislative
or other attempts to make the sacrifice of mother-
hood anything but a purely voluntary sacrifice.

One realises the difficulties of so complete a change
not only in the attitude of man to woman, but in
the attitude of woman towards herself. Two of
these difficulties at the present day loom promi-
nently; the economic and the sentimental. The
Great State, one takes it, would deal trenchantly
with the first — the economic — difficulty; even its
sourest spinster would not need to starve. But the
stodgy mass of false sentiment on the subject of
sexual relations and children that has come down
to us through the ages — the glorification of mother-
hood, however compiilsory, however stupidly un-
thinking — that is a more insidious and more deadly
matter. It is through that stodgy mass of false
sentiment that the woman of to day and to-morrow
has got to wade if she is ever to attain to anything
like moral and intellectual equaKty with her brother
and her mate. And be it noted that, in order to
overcome false sentiment and false idealism, she
must refuse most steadfastly to take advantage of it.
If the Great or any other State is once permitted

227

THE GREAT STATE

to look upon its women with a sentimental eye, the
last condition of those women will be even as their
first. Once more they wiU sink back into the class
of wives and mothers, and fotmd their claims to con-
sideration solely upon their position as the breeding
factor of the race; whereupon the Law, like the
society from which it emanates, will pet them and
kick them by turns. Once more they will slide back
to the position of parasites living by sexual attraction
and finding favour in the eyes of husband or lover
on the express condition that they do not presume
to compete with husband or lover in intellect.

It is not, I think, generally recognised how largely
— one may hope entirely — the undoubtedly low level
of intelligence in woman, as compared with man, is
the direct result and product of dire economic
necessity, the need for bread or the need for success in
life. It has paid woman in the past — in some walks
of life, notably marriage, it still pays them — ^to be
stupid; intelligence in woman has been an obstacle
to, not a qualification for, motherhood. The con-
sciousness of superiority is a pleasant thing; and it
is a sober fact that for countless generations the
human male has taken real and active pleasure in
despising the mental attainments of the human
female; has insisted with emphasis that the wife
of his bosom, the mother of his children, should be a
creature he could look down upon as well as love.
Standing in the position of capitalist — of employer
in a compulsory trade — ^the average husband was

228

WOMEN IN THE GREAT STATE

able to dictate terms, to bargain for and obtain in
his helpmeet the low level of intellectuality which he
considered necessary to his comfort and self-esteem.
With the bitter result for the human race that the
mothers thereof have been, to a great extent, se-
lected for their lack of wisdom and encouraged to be
greater fools than nature intended to make theni.

I have already taken it for granted that the State
of the future will deal with this economic temptation
to stupidity on the part of woman by assuring her
bread and by opening to her other careers than mar-
riage, many of them demanding the use of intel-
ligence. Certainty of bread alone will not provide
her with brains; but, by automatically removing the
need to cultivate stupidity for a livelihood, it will
place her in a position to make use of such brain as
she possesses; with probable results of importance
to herself as well as to the race.

It may possibly be urged that the placing of the
average woman in a position of economic equality
with himself would not necessarily remove the deep-
seated desire of the average man to despise the part-
ner of his joys and sorrows. Under present condi-
tion^ it is impossible to speak with certainty on the
point; and it may be, of course, that the said desire
is instinctive and inherent rather than artificial and
acquired. But, whether instinctive or acquired,
there can be no doubt about its evil results on the
race in general; and the duty of a far-sighted com-
munity is to control, as far as possible, such instincts

229

THE GREAT STATE

as are dangerous to its health and progress by the
provision of an adequate system of check and counter-
balance. Human nature, unfortunately, tends to
despise and take pleasure in subjecting its economic
as well as its intellectual inferiors; thus, with the
removal of general economic disability, it is more
than possible that the masculine estimate of, and
consideration for, woman will rise to a higher level.
So far as I can make out there are few groimds for
the supposition that the sex instinct in man is so
faint as to run serious risk of extinction through loss
of contempt for its object; but, even in the rather
unlikely event of a considerable diminution in
woman's power of sex attraction, society in general
would have no right of complaint against her. On
the contrary, society in general owes her a heavy
debt for the sacrifice of all those qualities and pos-
sibilities of her life which, according to its narrow
judgment, interfered with her primary duty of
attracting the opposite sex.

I have not the faintest doubt that the motive
power underlying the present and growing revolt
of woman against her traditional conditions of en-
vironment is the strengthening consciousness of her
own degradation — a degradation which is the direct
result of her environment, the direct result of gen-
erations of cramped intellectuality and concentra-
tion of all powers of mind and body upon sexual
attraction and child-bearing. The usual justifica-
tion for a state of things which has resulted in the

230

WOMEN IN THE GREAT STATE

undesirable inferiority of woman to man, in mind
as well as in body, is the welfare of the race. (In
this connection one concludes that the word "race"
is used to denqte only the masculine half of the
species.) The welfare of the race, we are given to
understand, demands that a woman shall live only
through and by her husband and her children; the
sacrifice to them of all her other interests and ener-
gies is a sacrifice demanded of her by Nature in
the interests of the species. . ... It is obvious that
Nature does demand a sacrifice from the mothers
of the race; the sacrifice of physical suffering; but,
with regard to the other disabilities imposed upon
her, there are two or three questions which woman
is beginning to ask, and to which she has a right to
demand plain answers. They run something like
this:

How far has Society the right to increase the bur-
den that Nature has laid on her?

How far has Society the right, hitherto exercised,
to insist on a training and environment which en-
courages bodily weakness and moral and intel-
lectual dependence in women?

Is it possible to enfeeble one-half of the race and
leave the other half free to fulfil its destiny of
progress, or does man bom of woman have to share
in the end the degradation he has allotted to oth-
ers?

Roughly speaking, it is expediency that will an-
swer in the end. If, in the long run, it be proved

231

THE GREAT STATE

that the race cannot get on without sacrificing in
the process the individuality and independence of
its women, without crushing them into one mould,
without confining their energies to one channel —
then in the long run the race will have to insist in
the future, as it has insisted in the past, on the de-
pendence mental, moral, and physical, on the
virtual subjection of its women. If, on the other
hand, it be proved and realised — as the modem
feminist believes that it will be proved and realised
— that woman, as an integral part of the species,
cannot be brutalised and retarded in her personal
development without, in her turn, brutalising and
retarding Society in general; that the excessive
sacrifice demanded of her is not paid by herself
alone, but that her consequent inferiority reacts
upon the son of woman who desires and encourages it ;
that the consistent policy of regarding her as nothing
but the breeding factor of the race has actually im-
paired her value as the breeding factor of the race —
then it will be manifestly the interest as well as the
duty of Society in general to reconsider its attitude
towards woman and seek not to increase but to allevi-
ate and cotmteract the burden of weakness laid on
her by Nature. If it be proved to the satisfaction of
Society that woman as a parasite condemned to live
by sexual attraction, by marriage and prostitution,
is a source, not of strength, but of weakness to the
State, not of strength, but of weakness to the race,
Society, as a matter of course, will do all in its

232

WOMEN IN THE GREAT STATE

power to discourage parasitism and encourage in-
dependence in women. For the simple reason that,
in casting up its accounts, it will have discovered
how high a price it has paid for sex dominance, on
one hand, and sex subjection, on the other — ^how
high a price in blood and brain and money and hope-
less confusion of issues.

Let me condense, then, into as few words as possible
the root principles which I conceive will actuate the
Great State in its endeavours to deal justly with
women as a class.

1. Having recognised parasitism as an evil, the
Great State will discourage that form of feminine
parasitism which gains a livelihood through the
exercise of sexual attraction. That is to say, it
will render it unnecessary for any woman to earn
her livelihood by means of her powers of sexual
attraction.

2. Having recognised women as citizens and in-
dividuals — with a primary instead of secondary ex-
istence, a place in the world as well as in the house —
the Great State will permit and encourage them to
employ their energies and abilities in every direc-
tion in which they desire to employ such energies
and abilities. That is to say, it will throw open to
them every department of work at which they desire
and can prove their fitness to occupy themselves;
thereby instuing, so far as it is humanly possible
to insure, that marriage shall not be made by
-women, and children brought into the world by

233

THE GREAT STATE

them, merely because there is nothing else for
women to do but make marriages and bear children.
The Great State, in short, will hold it better that a
woman whose tastes do not He in the direction of
maternity should be a good spinster instead of an
indifferent mother.

It may be tirged that from my point of view the
Great State is an institution for the promotion of
the celibate life and the more or less rapid extinction
of the race. To which I can only reply that mar-
riage, as it affects one party to the contract — man —
has existed for a considerable period of time as a
purely voluntary institution, and that it does not
appear to be any less popular with him on that
account. I fail to see, therefore, why the modifi-
cation of the compulsory character of the institution,
as it affects the other party to the contract — woman
— should make it any less popular with her. Unless,
indeed, and in spite of all that has been sung and
said and written about woman's love and need of
motherhood, the sex instinct in us is so feeble a
thing that it wUl only work on compulsion — ^the
pressure of hunger, the lack of other occupation or
interest. ... If that should turn out to be the case,
I admit with all frankness that I see no particular
harm in leaving the sex and maternal instinct in
woman to die out of its own feebleness, to perish
in its own inertness; but, speaking personally, I see
no reason to suppose that so the world's troubles
will shortly be brought to end.

234

WOMEN IN THE GREAT STATE

If I refrain from prophecy concerning the par-
ticular direction in which the influence of women
who have attained to complete recognition as citi-
zens and individuals will make itself felt in the State
of the future, it is, honestly, because I find such
prophecy not merely difficult, but impossible. There
are certain things it is fairly safe to say: as, for in-
stance, that women in the main will always concern
themselves intimately with such legislation as affects
the conditions of motherhood and the health and
education of children. But the point of view from
which the absolutely free woman will approach
legislation affecting the condition of motherhood and
the health and education of children is a point of
view at present non-existent, or, at best, only
struggling into being. Enactments framed for the
protection of workers at a compulsory trade — ^as
marriage stiU is to a great extent, for women — ^will
necessarily be very different in character from enact-
ments framed to suit or improve the conditions of
workers who have a wide field of occupation and
livelihood to choose from. It is quite within the
bounds of possibility that workers with a wide field
of occupation and livelihood to choose from might
be unable to see why conjugal affection should be
interpreted as a desire to enter domestic service
without wages. It is quite within the bounds of
possibility that they might be unable to see any
necessary connection between conjugal affection and
domestic service, between the frying of bacon and

235

THE GREAT STATE

the bearing of the future citizen; and that, regard-
ing domestic service and conjugal affection as en-
tirely separate departments of hximan life and effort,
they would draw a sharp line of distinction and
division between housekeeping and marital love. . . .
The above is not intended as a prophecy; it is a
suggestion merely, a simple example of an every-day
problem which has not yet been approached by
women sufficiently independent in mind and in
pocket to at empt their own solution of it. It may
be that, when such women do attempt it, their solu-
tion thereof wil be the present, or masculine, solu-
tion; but, on the other hand, it may not. . . . The
only thing we know with certainty concerning the
attitude of the human race towards housework is
that men dislike it. Women, if asked, might be of
the same opinion. So far they have not been asked.
In the same way we can surmise with safety that
the present terms of the contract of marriage will
undergo considerable naodification; but it would be
rash to attempt an indication of the precise nature
of such modification. A bargain struck between
economic and social equals who desire to unite their
lives will, of necessity, be an entirely different affair
from a bargain struck, as at present, between a
member of a superior male class and a member of an
inferior female class. Further, the requirements of
a woman who merely desires a husband will differ to
a considerable extent from the requirements of the
woman who is endeavouring to secure not only a

236

WOMEN IN THE GREAT STATE

husband, but a means of livelihood, a home or a
refuge from the despised estate of spinsterhood.
For both parties to the contract the situation will
be simplified enormously; between them will lie
the clear issue — ^under present conditions obscured —
of mating and the rearing of children. . . . There
will be a foundation to build upon; rock-bottom
to work from.

If I have expressed my meaning with any degree
of clearness it will be understood that I consider the
best service the Great State can render to its women
will be to allow them to find their own level. That
is to say, to allow them to discover by means of
education and experiment the precise point at which
the real disabilities imposed on them by Nature can
be distinguished from the traditional and artificial
disabiUties imposed on them by Society. And in
this connection nothing should be assumed, nothing
should be taken for granted.

It should not be assumed, for instance, that
because a woman has married a husband and borne
him children her entire existence — ^her hopes and
her pleasures and ambitions — are bound up in wife-
hood and maternity. Any more than it should be
assumed that a wife and mother has an iinaccount-
able, instinctive preference for forms of labour
heartily disliked by other persons; forms of labour
which bring her in neither personal advancement
nor monetary reward. It shoxdd not be assumed

237

THE GREAT STATE

that the longing for and love of children exists in
every woman; it should not be assumed that it is un-
natural or abnormal for a woman to vary from the
accepted type. It should not be assumed that
woman is a childlike barbarian guided only by her
instincts, by the promptings of sex and maternity. . . .
AH these assumptions, of course, may be perfectly
correct; but, under present conditions and without
experience and experiment, I maintain that we have
no right to regard them as anything but speculative
guesses. Under present, and still more tmder past
conditions all these assumptions, these speculative
guesses, have not only been acted upon by the
masculine half of humanity, but instilled, from its
infancy upwards, into the feminine half of the race.
With the result that a good many of us are in the hu-
miliating position of not knowing what it is we want.
All we do know is that, for some mysterious reason,
we don't want the things we are told we ought to
want, don't like the things we are told we ought to
like. . . . And the Great State will have to give us
leave to find ourselves.

It is possible that the process of finding ourselves
may take time. We have the accumulation of gen-
erations of artificiality to throw off — of artificially
induced virtues as well as of artificially induced vices.
Submission and humility are not always compatible
with self-respect; complete absorption in the life of
another with progress in ''fine thinking."- "Love
and fine thinking," one takes it, will not always be

238

WOMEN IN THE GREAT STATE

demanded, as now, in separate consignments from
the separate sexes. The woman's point of view will
be asked for, not snubbed out of existence, by the
social organism of the future; hence, the woman will
have to fight her way to a point of view essentially
her own.

That she will hate doing so goes without saying.
In all ages man, in the mass, has hated the trouble
of thinking, has paid, implored others to do his
thinking for him: and it has never been enjoined
upon man, as it has upon woman, in the mass, that
he had no need to think, that ignorance was another
name for virtue. So much and so often has stupidity
been enjoined upon us, and so completely have we
obeyed the injunction, that out of our compliance
there has grown up the legend that nature has
designed us as creatures incapable of connected
thought. It is said and believed of us that the
mental processes by which we arrive at conclusions
are essentially and radically different from the mental
processes whereby the same conclusions are arrived
at by our men-folk; that, in short, we are instinctive
— or, as it is more courteously called, intuitive — ^not
reasoning beings.

The legend has this truth in it that, in deference
to the wishes of our men-folk, we have made smaU
use of our reason. . . . And,that being so, fine think-
ing may not come easy to us.

One of the essential differences between the at-
titude of the Great State towards its women and the

239

THE GREAT STATE

corresponding attitude of the Normal Social Life
will be that the former will permit and encourage
variety, where the other has insisted pn uniformity
of type. So far the atmosphere of the social organism
has been favourable to the production of but two
species of woman: the wife and mother, and her
equivalent outside the law. Custom and education
alike were strenuous and unceasing in their efforts to
run all womanhood into the same rfiould, to make
all womanhood conform to the same standard of
domesticity and charm. (It is, by the way, really
pitiful to think of the amount of energy wasted
through the ages and still wasted by countless
women in the vain endeavour to make themselves
what Nature never intended them to be — charming.)
Any variation from the above type has usually
been received with anything but a sympathetic wel-
come; on the contrary, its customary greeting was
a derisive hoot. Woman, in fact, until our own times
has been judged, measttred, and condemned by a
prehistoric standard requiring of her uniformity of
temperament, taste, and attainment, a standard
which has not been applied to man since the days
when the entire male population of the earth earned
its meat by the only trade it knew — the chase. It
is a curious proof of persistent masculine failure to
recognise in woman a humanity as complete as his
own, this absolute refusal of man (while himself
progressing along the lines of differentiation marked
out for him by Nature, becoming agriculturist and

240

WOMEN IN THE GREAT STATE

townsman and a thousand things besides) to per-
ceive in his partner and dependant any fitness or
capacity save fitness and capacity for the two oc-
cupations of sexual attraction and homekeeping.
Had he ever realised that his partner and dependant
was indeed as human and complete as himself, it
would surely have been borne in upon him that
nature and civilisation would work in her humanity
after much the same fashion as they worked in his —
by the production of numerous variations from an
original uniform type. Instead, therefore, of as-
suming that all variations from the accepted idea
of woman were unnatural, freakish, and out of place
in the scheme of Nature, he would have realised that
the really unnatural and abnormal feature about
womanhood in general was its unfortunate lack of
such variation, the artificially unhealthy uniform-
ity of type produced by generations of economic
pressure and restriction of opportunity. After all, it
is only when the normal number of variations from
the type are permitted to appear that you can say
with certainty what the type really is and to what
extent particular qualities are essentially charac-
teristic of it.

There are, it seems to me, good grounds for be-
lieving that the common basis of human character
is very much wider than has hitherto been supposed.
Given the same influence and environment, the
customary difference between the desires and be-
haviour of the sexes lessens perceptibly, swiftly,

241 R

THE GREAT STATE

and automatically, thereby often proving itself to
be more customary than natural. Warfare, for
instance, has seldom been looked upon as a feminine
business; on the contrary woman has usually been
shielded from contact with actual bloodshed. Yet,
over and over again, when brought into contact
with actual bloodshed woman has proved that such
contact acts upon her in much the same fashion
as it does upon man; that the hardships of a siege
or the fury of hand-to-hand fighting produce in her
symptoms of wrath, desperation, and hatred which
are in no way essentially different from the cor-
responding symptoms in her brethren. Again, it
has been assumed that the power of combination
for a common purpose is a characteristic essentially
male; those who took the assumption for granted
forgetting that it was the military tradition — the
need for standing together in the face of a common
enemy — ^that first taught combination to men. The
political tradition was but the same lesson repeated
in other terms — a lesson for men only; and so was
the male industrial system, the habit of working
together in numbers. . . . Only on comparatively
rare occasions in the history of the world has war-
fare or political activity entered directly into the
lives of women except in so far as they suffered or
advantaged passively from the effects of both.
While the home industries at which for centuries
the great majority of women were accustomed to
earn their keep, if little else — ^brewing, baking,

242

WOMEN IN THE GREAT STATE

spinning, child-tending, domestic labotir of every
sort and kind — ^were, in the very nature of things,
isolated industries, carried on in separate house-
holds on a small scale and without co-operation or
combination. The home industry kept its workers
apart; it did not bring cooks, housewives, nurses,
and weavers together in their tens and their hundreds
and unite them by the tie of a common interest in
their common labour. It was not until many of
these isolated industries began to dwindle and
vanish with the general introduction of machinery
and consequent reorganisation and centralisation of
the means of production; not until the home ceased
to be a self-supporting institution and became
merely a place to dwell in, that women began to
learn, outside the home, the lesson of combination
they had never learned inside it. When the weaving
trade, the spinning trade, the brewing trade, the
pickling trade, and half a dozen others had re-
moved themselves bodily from the kitchen or
parlour to the factory, drawing after them inevi-
tably the workers who depended on those trades
for a living, then, practically for the first time,
women were steadily and systematically thrown
together in large numbers, with the tie of a common
work between them, with similar aims and hard-
ships, and similar causes of resentment.

When we remember how very recent is the intro-
duction of women to the organised collective life
of the community, it seems remarkable that they

243

THE GREAT STATE

have so quickly responded to its appeal and assimi-
lated its influence. Collective labour outside the
narrow confines of the home is already working
upon them exactly as it has worked upon their
brothers ; informing them with the spirit and power
of combination and a sense of class, as distinct from
individual and family, need. The insistent and
growing demand of women for a share in political
power is the direct aiid inevitable result of the
revolution in industrial conditions which has driven
them out of the isolation of their homes to earn their
bread and rub shoulders with others in the process.
To take another instance of a human quality
hitherto considered masculine: not the least in-
teresting feature of the Woman Suffrage movement
in England is the fact that the excitement of politi-
cal struggle has produced in a certain type of healthy
young woman exactly the effect which it often pro-
duces in a similar type of healthy young man — the
excited mental condition which expresses itself in
acts of rowdyism. I would not be understood to
mean that all the women who, of late years, have
taken part in what are known as militant suffrage
demonstrations belong to the rowdy type; on the
contrary, I should say that the proportion was small
indeed compared with the numbers of those who are
actuated by a sense of duty, self-sacrifice, and
loyalty. But no one who has mingled observantly
with the demonstrators can doubt that the rowdy
type amongst women exists — ^the girl who, like her

244

WOMEN IN THE GREAT STATE

brother, is at the same time thrilled and amused by
the idea of actual conflict and whose high spirits find
natiu-al vent in noise and vehement action, usually-
destructive. I see no reason why the fact should be
denied: first, because it is a fact; secondly, because
it does not seem to me a fact to be greatly ashamed
of. A touch of rowdyism has always been taken for
granted in the youthful human male; the militant
suffrage movement has shown us that we must hence-
forth take it for granted in the ^^-ruthful human
female — and thereby demonstrated that a character-
istic hitherto deemed the peculiar property of the
male was only awaiting an opportunity to reveal
itself as the common possession of both sexes.

If I am right in supposing that the present un-
doubted superiority of man over woman is less a
sex than a class superiority, and that the essential
differences between naturally developed man and
naturally developed woman are fewer than is com-
monly supposed, it follows that those legislative
enactments in the State of the future which affect
women as a class apart will be comparatively few
in number. Motherhood, of course, will always
place a woman in a class apart for a certain length
of time, a class demanding special provision and
undertaking special responsibilities. But in deal-
ing with women in general the State of the future
will be mindful of the fact that it is deaHng with a
class whose interests are varied and multiple; it
will not assume that all the members of that class

245

THE GREAT STATE

are or ought to be in a perpetual condition of preg-
nancy, and try to regulate their existence accordingly.

It is, of course, one thing to give freedom; it is
quite another to induce the recipients of freedom
to make use of it. I believe that the conscience of
Society will insist in the very near future that
woman shall be granted every opporttmity of prov-
ing herself the equal of her brother in fact as well
as in name; it will rest with herself, therefore,
whether she takes full advantage of such opporttmity.
The real difficulty in her way, I take it, will be at
first the weakness and instability of purpose com-
mon to every class that has been accustomed to
exist without personal responsibility and need for
independent thinking. It is because they have
been composed of such a class that newly enfran-
chised democracies have so often proved lacking in
intelligent capacity for self-government. They have
failed because they were stupid; because the en-
lightened democracy has so far scarcely existed
outside an election address.

As I have pointed out, no other section of the com-
munity has been encouraged to be stupid to the same
extent as women. No influence could have been
better calculated to weaken moral fibre in a human
being than the long-accepted tradition — ^accepted
even by herself — ^that woman apart from man was
a creature half alive; that, as the cant phrase goes,
she was "incomplete." You cannot expect inde-
pendence of judgment and sense of responsibility

246

WOMEN IN THE GREAT STATE

from a being to whom you deny the elementary right
and fact of separate, independent existence.

Women, one imagines, will attain to liberty of
thought and action in much the same way as other
subjugated classes have attained and are attaining
it — ^by degrees more or less slow, and after passing
through what seems to be the inevitable process of
'revolting against one tyranny only to put another
in its place. In those long habituated to submission
and control the habit of dependence is, as a rule, too
deeply rooted to be swept away by the first uprush
of the desire for freedom; and, having overthrown
one idol, decrepit and despised, they are as apt as not
to set a new one in its place — one rigid dogma for
another, a new narrow loyalty in place of an old
blind one, a sovereign people in place of a sovereign
lord. . . . Watching the process of seemingly retro-
grade stumbling, the hearts of many who desired
freedom for others as well as for themselves have
grown sick even to despair of their ideal. A despair
not justified, save in the case of those who have never
revolted at all. For the habit of revolt against in-
justice grows, like other habits, by the exercise
thereof; so that those who have overthrown one
despotism, material or spiritual, wiU, in the end,
remember a precedent and turn /on the oppressor
themselves have set up in its stead. It is the first
forward step, the precedent for revolt, in a subject
class that counts; since what has been done before
can always be done again.

247

THE ARTIST IN THE GREAT STATE

BY ROGER FRY

IX

THE ARTIST IN THE GREAT STATE

I AM not a Socialist, as I understand that word, nor
can I pretend to have worked out those complex esti-
mates of economic possibility which are needed before
one can indorse the hopeful forecasts of Lady Warwick,
Mr. Money, and Mr. Wells. What I propose to do
here is first to discuss what efifect plutocracy, such as
it is to-day, has had of late, and is likely to have in
the near future, upon one of the things which I should
hke to imagine continuing upon our planet — ^namely,
art. And then briefly to prognosticate its chances
under such a r6gime as my colleagues have sketched.

As I understand it, art is one of the chief organs of
what, for want of a better word, I must call the
spiritual life. It both stimulates and controls those
indefinable overtones of the material life of man
which all of us at moments feel to have a quality
of permanence and reality that does not belong to
the rest of our experience. Nattire demands with
no tmcertain voice that the physical needs of the
body shall be satisfied first; but we feel that our real
human life only begins at the point where that is
accomplished, that the man who works at some

2SI

THE GREAT STATE

tincreative and uncongenial toil merely to earn
enough food to enable him to continue to work has
not, properly speaking, a human life at all.

It is the argument of commercialism, as it once
was of aristocracy, that the accumulation of surplus
wealth in a few hands enables this spiritual life to
maintain its existence, that no really valuable or
useless work (for from this point of view only useless
work has value) could exist in the community with-
out such accumulations o wealth. The argument
has been employed for the disinterested work of
scientific research. A doctor of naturally liberal
and generous impulses told me that he was becoming
a reactionary simply because he feared that public
bodies would never give the money necessary for
research with anything like the same generosity as
is now shown by the great plutocrats. But Sir Ray
Lankester does not find that generosity sufficient,
and is prepared at least to consider a State more
ample-spirited.

The situation as regards art and as regards the
disinterested love of truth is so similar that we
might expect this argument in favour of a plutocratic
social order to hold equally well for both art and
science, and that the artist would be a fervent
upholder of the present system. As a matter of
fact, the more representative artists have rarely been
such, and not a few, though working their life long
for the plutocracy, have been vehement Socialists.

Despairing of the conditions due to modem com-
252

THE ARTIST IN THE GREAT STATE

mercialism, it is not unnatural that lovers of beauty
should look back with nostalgia to the age when
society was controlled by a landed aristocracy. I
believe, however, that from the point of view of the
encouragement of great creative art there is not much
difference between an aristocracy and a plutocracy.
The aristocrat usually had taste, the plutocrat fre-
quently has not. Now taste is of two kinds, the first
consisting in the negative avoidance of all that is ill-
considered and discordant, the other positive and a
by-product; it is that harmony which always results
from the expression of intense and disinterested
emotion. The aristocrat, by means of his good taste
of the negative kind, was able to come to terms with
the artist; the plutocrat has not. But both alike
desire to buy something which is incommensurate
with money. Both want art to be a background to
their radiant self -consciousness. They want to buy
beauty as they want to buy love; and the painter,
picture-dealer, and the pander try perennially to per-
suade them that it is possible. But living beauty
cannot be bought ; it must be won. I have said that
the aristocrat, by his taste, by his feeling for the acci-
dentals of beauty, did manage to get on to some
kind of terms with the artist. Hence the art of the
eighteenth century, an art that is prone before the
distinguished patron, subtly and deliciously flatter-
ing and yet always fine. In contrast to that the art
of the nineteenth century is coarse, turbulent, clumsy.
It marks the beginning of a revolt. The artist just

253

THE GREAT STATE

managed to let himself be coaxed and cajoled by the
aristocrat, but when the aristocratic was succeeded by
the plutocratic patron with less conciliatory manners
and no taste, the artist rebelled; and the history of
art in the nineteenth century is the history of a band
of heroic Ishmaelites, with no secure place in the
social system, with nothing to support them in the
unequal struggle but a dim sense of a new idea, the
idea of the freedom of art from aU trammels and
tyrannies.

The place that the artists left vacant at the plu-
tocrat's table had to be filled, and it was fiUed by a
race new in the history of the world, a race for whom
no name has yet been found, a race of pseudo-
artists. As the prostitute professes to sell love, so
these gentlemen professed to sell beauty, and they
and their patrons rollicked good-humouredly through
the Victorian era. They adopted the name and some-
thing of the manner of artists; they intercepted
not only the money, but the titles and fame and
glory which were intended for those whom they had
supplanted. But, while they were yet feasting, there
came an event which seemed at the time of no im-
portance, but which was destined to change ulti-
mately the face of things, the exhibition of ancient
art at Manchester in 1857. And with this came
Ruskin's address on the Political Economy of Art, a
work which surprises by its prophetic foresight when
we read it half a century later. These two things
were the Mene Tekel of the orgy of Victorian Phil-

254

THE ARTIST IN THE GREAT STATE

istinism. The plutocrat saw through the decep-
tion; it was not beauty the pseudo-artist sold him,
any more than it was love wJiich the prostitute gave.
He turned from it in disgust and decided that the
only beauty he cotdd buy was the dead beauty of
the past. Thereupon set in the worship of patine
and the age of forgery and the detection of forgery,
I once remarked to a rich man that a statue by Ro-
din might be worthy even of his collection. He re-
plied, "Show me a Rodin with the patine of the
fifteenth century, and I will buy it."

Patine, then, the adventitious material beauty
which age alone can give, has come to be the object
of a reverence greater than that devoted to the idea
which is enshrined within the work of art. People
are right to admire patine. Nothing is more beau-
tiful than gilded bronze of whidi time has taken
toU tmtil it is nothing but a faded shimmering
splendour over depths of inscrutable gloom; noth-
ing finer than the dull glow which Pentelic marble
has gathered from past centuries of sunlight and
warm Mediterranean breezes. Patine is good, but
it is a surface charm added to the essential beauty
of expression; its beauty is literally skin-deep. It
can never come into being or exist in or for itself;
no patine can make a bad work good, or the forgers
would be justified. It is an adjectival and ancillary
beauty scarcely worthy of our prolonged contem-
plation.

There is to the philosopher something pathetic
255

THE GREAT STATE

in the Plutocrat's worship of patine. It is, as it were,
a compensation for his own want of it. On himself
all the rough thumb and chisel marks of his maker —
and he is self-made — ^stand as yet tmpolished and
raw; but his furniture, at least, shall have the dis-
tinction of age-long acquaintance with good manners.

But the net result of all this is that the artist has
nothing to hope from the Plutocrat. To him we
must be grateful indeed for that brusque disillusion-
ment of the real artist, the real artist who might
have rubbed along uneasily for yet another century
with his predecessor, the aristocrat. Let us be
grateful to him for this; but we need not look to
him for further benefits, and if we decide to keep
him the artist must be content to be paid after he
is dead and vicariously in the person of an art-
dealer. The artist must be content to look on while
sums are given for dead beauty, the tenth part of
which, properly directed, would irrigate whole nations
and stimulate once more the production of vital
artistic expression.

I would not wish to appear to blame the plutocrat.
He has often honestly done his best for art; the
trouble is not of his making more than of the art-
ist's, and the misunderstanding between art and com-
merce is bound to be complete. The artist, however
mean and avaricious he may appear, knows that he
cannot really sell himself for money any more than
the philosopher or the scientific investigator can sell
himself for money. He takes money in the hope

256

THE ARTIST IN THE GREAT STATE

that he may secure the opportunity fqr the free func-
tioning of his creative power. If the patron could
give him that instead of money he would bless him;
but he cannot, and so he tries to get him to work not
quite freely for money; and in revenge the artist
indulges in all manner of insolences, even perhaps in.
sharp practices, which make the patron feel, with
some justification, that he is the victim of ingrati-
tude and wanton caprice. It is impossible that the.
artist should work for the plutocrat ; he must work,
for himself, because it is only by so doing that he
can perform the function for which he exists; it is,
only by working for himself that he can work for
mankind.

If, then, the particular kind of accuniulation of
surplus wealth which we call plutocracy has failed,
as siu-ely it has signally failed, tQ stujiulate the
creative power of the imagination, what disposition,
of wealth might be conceived that would succeed^
better? First of all, a greater distribution of
wealth, with a lower standard of ostentation^ would^
I think, do a great deal to improve things without,
any great change in other conditions. It is ndt
enough known that the patronage which really
counts to-day is exercised by quite small an<i. hum-
ble people. These people with a few hundreds a.
year exercise a genuine patronage by buying pictures,
at ten, twenty, or occasionally thirty pounds, with,
real insight and understanding, thereby enabling the.
young Ishmaelite to live and function froni the ag^

257 s,

THE GREAT STATE

of twenty to thirty or so, when perhaps he becomes
known to richer buyers, those experienced spenders
of money who are always more cautious, more
anxious to buy an investment than a picture. These
poor, intelligent first patrons to whom I allude be-
long mainly to the professional classes; they have
none of the pretensions of the plutocrat and none
of his ambitions. The work of art is not for them,
as for him, a decorative backcloth to his stage, but
an idol and an inspiration. Merely to increase the
number and potency of these people would already
accomplish much; and this is to be noticed, that if
wealth were more evenly distributed, if no one had
a great deal of wealth, those who really cared for art
would become the sole patrons, since for all it would
be an appreciable sacrifice, and for none an impossi-
bility. The man who only buys pictures when he
has as many motor-cars as he can conceivably want
would drop out as a patron altogether.

But even this would only foster the minor and pri-
vate arts; and what the history of art definitely
elucidates is that the greatest art has always been
communal, the expression — ^in highly individualised
ways, no doubt — of common aspirations and ideals.

Let us suppose, then, that society were so arranged
that considerable surplus wealth lay in the hands
of public bodies, both national and local ; can we have
any reasonable hope that they would show more
skill in carrying out the delicate task of stimulating
and using the creative power of the artist ?

258

THE ARTIST IN THE GREAT STATE

The immediate prospect is certainly not en-
couraging. Nothing, for instance, is more deplorable
than to watch the patronage of <5ur provincial
museums. The gentlemen who administer these
public funds naturally have not realised so acutely
as private buyers the lesson so admirably taught at
Christie's, that pseudo or Royal-Academic art is a
bad investment. Nor is it better if we turn to
national patronage. In Great Britahi, at least, we
cannot get a postage stamp or a penny even respec-
tably designed, much less a public monument. In-
deed, the tradition that all public British art shall
be crassly mediocre and inexpressive is so firmly
rooted that it seems to have almost the prestige of
constitutional precedent. Nor will any one who has
watched a committee commissioning a presentation
portrait, or even buying an old master, be in danger
of taking too optimistic a view. With rare and
shining exceptions, committees seem to be at the
mercy of the lowest common denominator of their
individual natures, which is dominated by fear of
criticism; and fear and its attendant, compromise,
are bad masters of the arts.

Speaking recently at Liverpool, Mr. Bernard
Shaw placed the present situation as regards public
art in its true light. He declared that the corrup-
tion of taste and the emotional insincerity of th6
mass of the people had gone so far that any picture
which pleased more than ten per cent, of the popu-
lation should be immediately btuned. . . .

259

THE GREAT STATE

This, then, is the fundamental fact we have to
face. And it is this that gives us pause when we
try to construct any conceivable system of public
patronage.

For the modem artist puts the question of any
socialistic — or, indeed, of any completely ordered —
state in its acutest form. He demands as an es-
sential to the proper use of his powers a freedom
from restraint such as no other workman expects.
He must work when he feels inclined; he cannot
work to order. Hence his frequent quarrels with
the burgher who knows he has to work when he is
disinclined, and cannot conceive why the artist
should not do likewise. The burgher watches the
artist's wayward and apparently quite unmethodical
activity, and envies his job. Now in any Socialistic
State, if certain men are licensed to pursue the
artistic calling, they are likely to be regarded by the
other workers with some envy. There may be a
competition for such soft jobs among those who are
naturally work-shy, since it will be evident that the
artist is not called to account in the same way as
other workers.

If we suppose, as seems not unlikely, in view of
the immense numbers who become artists in our
present social state, that there would be this com-
petition for the artistic work of the community,
what methods would be devised to select those re-
quired to fill the coveted posts ? Frankly, the history
of art in the nineteenth century makes us shudder

260

THE ARTIST IN THE GREAT STATE

at the results that would follow. One scarcely knows
whether they would be worse if Bumble or the
academy were judge. We only know that under any
such conditions none of the artists whose work has
ultimately counted in the spiritual development of
the race would have been allowed to practise the
coveted profession.

There is in truth, as Ruskin pointed out in his
Political Economy of Art, a gross and wanton waste
under the present system. We have thousands of
artists who are only so by accident and by name, on
the one hand, and certainly many — one cannot tell
how many — ^who have the special gift but have
never had the peculiar opportunities which are to-
day necessary to allow it to expand and function.
But there is, what in an odd way consoles us, a blind
chance that the gift and the opportunity may
coincide; that Shelley and Browning may have a
competence, and Cezanne a farm-house he could
retire to. Bureaucratic Socialism would, it seems,
take away even this blind chance that mankind may
benefit by its least appreciable, most elusive treas-
ures, and would carefuUy organise the complete sup-
pression of original creative power; would organise
into a universal and all-embracing tyranny the al-
ready overweening and disastrous power of endowed
official art. For we must face the fact that the
average man has two qualities which would make
the proper selection of the artist almost impossible.
He has, first of all, a touching proclivity to awe-struck

261

THE GREAT STATE

admiration of whatever is presented to him as noble
by a constituted authority; and, secondly, a com-
plete absence of any immediate reaction to a work
of art until his judgment has thus been hypnotised
by the voice of authority. Then, and not till then,
he sees, or swears he sees, those adorable Emperor's
clothes that he is always agape for.

I am speaking, of course, of present conditions, of
a populace whose emotional life has been drugged by
the sugared poison of pseudo-art, a populace satu-
rated with snobbishness, and regarding art chiefly for
its value as a symbol of social distinctions. There
have been t mes when such a system of public
patronage as we are discussing might not have been
altogether disastrous. Times when the guilds repre-
sented more or less adequately the genuine artistic
intelligence of the time ; but the creation, first of all,
of aristocratic art, and finally of pseudo-art, have
brought it about that almost any officially organised
system would at the present moment stereotype all
the worst features of modern art.

Now, in thus putting forward the extreme diffi-
culties of any system of publicly controlled art, we
are emphasising perhaps too much the idea of the
artist as a creator of purely ideal and abstract works,
as the medium of inspiration and the source of
revelation. It is the artist as prophet and priest that
we have been considering, the artist who is the
articulate soul of mankind. Now in the present
commercial State, at a time when such handiwork

262

THE ARTIST IN THE GREAT STATE

as is not admirably fitted to some purely utilitarian
purpose has become inanely fatuous and grotesque,
the artist in this sense has undoubtedly become of
supreme importance as a protestant, as one who
proclaims that art is a reasonable function, and one
that proceeds by a nice adjustment of means to ends.
But if we suppose a state in which all the ordinary
objects of daily life — our chairs and tables, our
carpets and pottery — expressed something of this
reasonableness instead of a crazy and vapid fantasy,
the artist as a pure creator might become, not indeed
of less importance — ^rather more — ^but a less acute
necessity to our general living than he is to-day.
Something of the sanity and purposefulness of his
attitude might conceivably become infused into the
work of the ordinary craftsman, something, too, of
his creative energy and delight in work. We must,
therefore, turn for a moment from the abstractly
creative artist to the applied arts and those who
practise them.

We are so far obliged to protect ourselves from the
implications of modem life that without a special
effort it is hard to conceive the enormous quantity
of "art" that is annually produced and consumed.
For the special purpose of realising it I take the pains
to write the succeeding paragraphs in a railway
rrfreshment-room, where I am actually looking at
those terribly familiar but fortunately fleeting
images which such places afford. And one must
remember that public places of this kind merely

263

THE GREAT STATE

reflect the average citizen's soul, as expressed in his
home.

The space my eye travels over is a small one, but
I am appalled at the amount of "art" that it har-
bours. The window towards which I look is filled
in its lower part by stained glass; within a highly
elaborate border, designed by some one who knew
the conventions of thirteenth-century glass, is a pat-
tern of yellow and purple vine leaves with bunches of
grapes, and flitting about among these many small
birds. In front is a lace curtain with patterns taken
from at least four centuries and as many countries.
On the walls, up to a height of four feet, is a covering
of lincrusta walton stamped with a complicated pat-
tern in two colours, with sham silver medallions.
Above that a moulding but an inch wide, and yet
creeping throughout its whole with a degenerate
descendant of a Gr«co-Roman carved guilloche pat-
tern; this has evidently been cut out of the wood by
machine or stamped out of some composition — its
nature is so perfectly concealed that it is hard to say
which. Above this is a wall-paper in which an effect
of eighteenth-century satin brocade is imitated by
shaded staining of the paper. Each of the little
refreshment-tables has two cloths, one arranged
symmetrically with the table, the other a highly
ornate printed cotton arranged "artistically" in a
diagonal position. In the centre of each table is a
large pot in which every beautifitl quality in the
material and making of pots has been carefully ob-

264

THE ARTIST IN THE GREAT STATE

literated by methods each of which implies profound
scientific knowledge and great inventive talent.
Within each pot is a plant with large dark-green
leaves, apparently made of ndia-rubber. This pain-
ftil catalogue makes up only a small part of the in-
ventory of the "art " of the restaurant. If I were to
go on to tell of the legs of the tables, of the electric-
light fittings, of the chairs into the wooden seats of
which some tremendous mechanical force has deeply
impressed a large distorted anthemion — ^if I were to
tell of all these things, my reader and I might both
begin to realise with painful acuteness something of
the horrible toU involved in all this display. Dis-
play is indeed the end and explanation of it all. Not
one of these things has been made because the maker
enjoyed the making; not one has been bought be-
cause its contemplation would give any one any
pleasure, but solely because each of these things is
accepted as a symbol of a particular social status. I
say their contemplation can give no one pleasure;
they are there because their absence would be
resented by the average man who regards a large
amount of futile display as in some way inseparable
from the conditions of that well-to-do life to which
he belongs or aspires to belong. If everything were
merely clean and serviceable he would proclaim the
place bare and uncomfortable.

The doctor who lines his waiting-room with bad
photogravures and worse etchings is acting on
exactly the same principle; in short, nearly all our

265

THE GREAT STATE

"art" is made, bought, and sold merely for its value
as an indication of social status.-

Now consider the case of those men whose life-work
it is to stimulate this eczematous eruption of pattern
en the surface of modem manufacttires. They are
by far the most numerous "artists" in the country.
Each of them has not only learned to draw but has
learned by sheer application to put forms together
with a similitude of that coherence which creative
impulse gives. Probably each of them has some-
where within him something of that creative impulse
which is the inspiration and delight of every savage
and primitive craftsman : but in these manufacturer's
designers the pressure of commercial life has crushed
and atrophied that creative impulse completely.
Their business is to produce, not expressive design,
but dead patterns. They are compelled, therefore, to
spend their lives behaving in an entirely idiotic and
senseless manner, and that with the certairity that
no one will ever get positive pleasure from the result;
for one may safely risk the statement that until I
made the effort just now, no one of the thousands who
use the refreshment-rooms ever reaUy looked at the
designs.

. Now what effect would the development of the
Great State which this book anticipates have upon
all this? First, I suppose that the fact that every
one had to work Inight produce a new reverence,
especially in the governing body, for work, a new
sense of disgust and horror at wasteful and purpose-

266

THE ARTIST IN THE 'GREAT STATE

less work. Mr. Money has written of waste of workr
here in unwanted pseudo-art is another colossal
waste. Add to this ideal of economy in work the
presumption that the workers in every craft would
be more thoroughly organised and would have a more
decisive voice in the nature and quality of their pro-
ductions. Under the present system of commercial-
ism the one object, and the complete justification, of
producing any article is, that it can be made either
by its intrinsic value, or by the fictitious value put
upon it by advertisement, to sell with a sufficient
profit to the manufacturer. In any socialistic state,
I imagine — ^and to a large extent the Great State will
be sQcialistic at least — ^there would not be this same
autoinatic justification for manufacture; people
would not be induced artificially to buy what they
did not want, and in this way a more genuine scale
@f values would be developed. Moreover, the work-
man would be in a better position to say how things
should be made. After years of a purely commer-
cial standard, there is even now, in the average
workman, left a certain bias in favour of sound and
reasonable workmanship as opposed to the ingenious
manufacture of fatuous and fraudulent objects;
and, if we suppose the immediate pressure of sheer
necessity to be removed, it is probable that the
craftsman, acting through his guild organisations,
would determine to some extent the methods of
manufacture. Guilds might, indeed, regain some-
thing of the political influence that gave us the Gothic

267

THE GREAT STATE

cathedrals of the Middle Ages. It is quite probable
that this gtiild influence wotild act as a check on
some innovations in manufacture which, though
bringing in a profit, are really disastrous to the
commtmity at large. Of such a nature are all the
so-called improvements whereby decoration, the whole
value of which consists in its expressive power, is
multiplied indefinitely by machinery. When once
the question of the desirability of any and every
production came to be discussed, as it wotild be in
the Great State, it would inevitably follow that some
reasonable and scientific classifications would be
undertaken with regard to machinery. That is to
say, it would be considered in what process and to
what degree machinery ought to replace handi-
work, both from the point of view of the community
as a whole and from that of the producer. So far
as I know, this has never been tmdertaken even with
regard to mere economy, no one having calculated
with precision how far the longer life of certain
hand-made articles does not more than compensate
for increased cost of production. And I suppose
that in the Great State other things besides mere
economy would come into the calculation. The
Great State will live, not hoard.

It is probable that in many directions we should
extend mechanical operations immensely, that such
things as the actual construction of buildings, the
mere laying and placing of the walls might become
increasingly mechajiical. Such methods, if con-

268

THE ARTIST IN THE GREAT STATE

fined to purely stnictural elements, are capable of
beauty of a special kind, since they can express the
ordered ideas of proportion, balance, and interval as
conceived by the creative mind of the architect.
But in process of time one might hope to see a sharp
line of division between work of this kind and such
purely expressive and non-utilitarian design as we
call ornament; and it would be felt clearly that into
this field no mechanical device should intrude, that,
while ornament might be dispensed with, it could
never be imitated, since its only reason for being is
that it conveys the vital expressive power of a htunan
mind acting constantly and directly upon material
forms.

Finally, I suppose that in the Great State we might
hope to see such a considerable levelling of social
conditions that the false values put upon art by
its symboUsing of social status would be largely
destroyed and, the pressure of mere opinion being
rdieved, people would develop some more immedi-
ate reaction to the work of art than they can at
present achieve.

Supposing, then, that tmder the Great State it
was found impossible, at all events at first, to stimu-
late and organise the abstract creative power of the
pure artist, the balance might after all be in favour
of the new order if the whole practice of applied art
could once more become rational and purposeful.
In a world where the objects of daily use and orna-
ment were made with practical common sense, the

269

THE GREAT STATE

aesthetic sense would need far less to seek consolation
and repose in works of pure art.

Nevertheless, in the long run mankind will not
allow this function, which is necessary to its spirit-
ual life, to lapse entirely. I imagine, however, that
it would be much safer to penalise rather than t©
stimulate such activity, and that simply in order to
sift out those with a genuine passion from those who
are merely attracted by the apparent ease of the pur-
suit. I imagine that the artist would naturally turn
to one of the applied arts as his means of hvelihood;
and we should get the artist coming out of the
bottega, as he did in fifteenth-century Florence.
There are, moreover, innumerable crafts, even be-
sides those that are definitely artistic, which, if
pursued for short hours (Mr. Money has shown
how short these hours might be), would leave
a man free to pursue other callings in his lei-
sure.

The majority of poets to-day are artists in this
position. It is comparatively rare for any one to
make of poetry his actual means of livelihood.
Our poets are, first of all, clerks, critics, civil servants,
or postmen. I very much doubt if it would be a
serious loss to the community if the pure graphic
artist were in the same position. That is to say,
that all our pictures would be made by amateurs.
It is quite possible to suppose that this would be not
a loss, but a great gain. The painter's means of live-
lihood would probably be some craft in which his

27b

THE ARTIST IN THE GREAT STATE

artistic powers would te constantly occupied, though
at a lower tension and in a humbler way. The Great
State aims at human freedom; essentially, it is an
organisation for leisure — out of which art grows;
it is only a purely bureaucratic Socialism that
would attempt to control the aesthetic lives of
men.

So I conceive that those in whom the instinct for
abstract creative art was strongest would find ample
opporttmities for its exercise, and that the tempta-
tion to simulate this particular activity would be
easily resisted by those who had no powerful inner
compulsion.

In the Great State, moreover, and in any sane
Socialism, there would be opportunity for a large
amount of purely private buying and selling. Mr.
Wells's Modem Utopia, for example, hypothecates
a vast superstructure of private trading. A painter
might ^ell his pictures to those who were engaged
in more lucrative employment, though one supposes
that with the much more equal distribution of wealth
the sums available for this would be incomparably
smaller than at present; a picture would not be
a speculation, but a pleasure, and no one would
become an artist in the hope of making a for-
tune.

Ultimately, of course, when art had been purified
of its present unreality by a prolonged contact
with the crafts, society would gain a new confidence
in its collective artistic judgment, and might even

271

THE GREAT STATE

boldly assume the responsibility which at present it
knows it is unable to face. It might choose its poets
and painters and philosophers and deep investigators,
and make of such men and women a new kind of
kings.

THE PRESENT DEVELOPMENT OF
THE GREAT STATE

BY G. R. STIRLING TAYLOR

X

THE PRESENT DEVELOPMENT OP
THE GREAT STATE

It is possible that some of the readers of this
book of essays may find the ideas involved in the
conception of the Great State altogether detached
from the facts of contemporary life and present
social construction. They may rather hastily as-
sume that, however desirable and pleasiu^able these
ideals may be, they are beyond the reach of human
attainment, and not in the line of any possible
social development. It will be the endeavour of the
present writer to consider the connecting-links
which, he believes, bind the ideal of the Great State
into an intimate- union with the facts of the social
order (or disorder) of to-day and to-morrow.

The use of the term "development" in the title
of this essay may be. expanded by an initial explana-
tion. There will be no assumption here that a period
of Transition will be followed by a time when the
Great State can be said to have arrived as an ac-
complished fact. The evidence before us seems to

27s T 2

THE GREAT STATE

forbid any such distinction between a period of
travelling and a moment of arrival. The serious
social reformer is wise enough to hope that he will
never arrive; he is optimistic enough to believe
that there will always be something better beyond.
He does not visualise himself as one of a party of
excursionists who will be disembarked at the Mil-
lennium, as it might be at the end of his favourite
sea-side pier. The conception of continual travel-
ling is innate in the ideal.

The Great State will not be a spontaneous crea-
tion or a sudden accomplishment. If it come at all,
it will be by a development of the human affairs which
make up the States of to-day. This essay will en-
deavour to analyse these existing social phenomena,
in order that it may be shown how, in the opinion
of the present writer, they are already tending in
the direction of the Great State, which is the ideal of
the other essayists in this book.

II

THE ELEMENTS OP DESTRUCTION

It will be generally admitted that there is no static
condition in social organisation. It is one of the
chief virtues of human nature to be eternally dis-
contented. The healthy mind is continually striv-
ing for something which it does not possess. And
this demand for change seems especially insistent

276

THE PRESENT DEVELOPMENT

at the present moment; the constructive statesman
of the day is faced by a more or less coherent chorus
of demands which will not be satisfied by any trivial
reform. For the purposes of clarity, it will be con-
venient to group these elements of discontent round
three main points.

There is, first, that chaotic manifestation of un-
rest which the newspaper headlines very fitly name
The Labour War — the struggle between the wage-
earners and the masters who buy their labour. The
wage-earners are demanding a higher wage, shorter
hours, and better conditions; in fact, they ask for
a larger share of the good things of life. This is no
new fact in history; it has been a very general hu-
man demand all through, wherever masters and men
have confronted each other. The new note in the
situation is the fact that there are indications that
the demand is now so united and insistent that the
present system of industrial organisation cannot long
continue to stand the strain. While the profits of
capital become smaller and more precarious, the
workers are continually demanding that their share
of the profits shall be larger. We seem to be near-
ing the point when it will no longer be possible to
pay a dividend to shareholders and employers when
the wages bill has been paid. Moreover, the workers
are being impelled towards revolutionary thoughts
and deed by the higher prices which are encroaching
on their already scanty wages. It also seems ob-
vious that, by continual strikes, the workers can in-

277

THE GREAT STATE

sist on their case being dealt with first. In other
words, whatever may have been, or whatever are
the advantages of the present industrial system
under the control of the capitalists, it is now on the
point of breaking down, becoming impossible.
Profit-making is its imperative end, and this is
rapidly becoming more difficult to reach.

But the Labour War is not merely between mas-
ter and man. The capitahsts are not only at war
with their workmen; they are at equally deadly war
with each other. The reformer can claim that he
is trying to save them from destruction instead of
trying to destroy them The smaller capitalists,
the smaller wholesale and retail producers and dis-
tributors are wearing each other out in a fierce war
waged to get control of the market. Circling round
these smaller men are the great financiers (for they
are now men with the banker's mind, rather than
experts in the intimate processes of their trades);
these greater capitalists are gradually extinguishing
the weaker members of their class; the small work-
shop is being shut because it can no longer do its
work as quickly and cheaply as the large factory.
Even m distribution, ^Jhe independent shopkeeper
is being supplanted by the "multiple-shop" system,
where often the retention of the individual name
only covers the position of the commissioned agent
of the combine which is working in the background.

So this term "Labour War" really covers some-
thing wider than the ghastly struggle of the manual

278

THE PRESENT DEVELOPMENT

labourers. It is a competition for the right to a
tolerable living wage, fought out between all those
human beings who are not in possession of sufficient
capital to allow them to look over the battle-field
asj non-combatants — ^that is to say, as persons pos-
sessing a "private income." There are compara-
tively few capitalists, however, who are not also
themselves engaged in the struggle, which, indeed, is
the general basis of Hfe in all the present great com-
munities.

It seems clear that a further development of this
struggle will bring about an impossible situation.
To a believer in the advantages of the Great State,
it is illuminating to observe that this Industrial
War is crushing out that wasteful competition which
the collectivist reformers have long condemned.
The smaller men, even the smaller states, are being
eliminated by the Pierpont Morgans, the Speyers,
the Rockefellers, the Rothschilds, the Harrimans, the
Beits. It begins to appear that one of these days,
if the present process continues without a change
of direction, we may get the Great State, indeed;'
but it will be tmder the autocratic control of the
final survivors of this terrific industrial struggle.
It is possible, by a happy chance, that these victors
might be benevolent despots, who would provide
for all their subjects a sufficiently generous living.
But such a state as this would be incompatible with
the possession of that individual liberty which is
• See Wells's When the Sleeper Wakes for an anticipation of this.

279

THE GREAT STATE

one of the fundamental desires of the healthy and
well-developed mind. It is, on the whole, only the
cramped mind that can submit to domination or
can look forward with pleasure to a plutocrat-ap-
pointed bureaucracy, however benevolent.

One turns from the discontents of the Labour War
— the distress of wage-earners and bankrupt masters
— to another huge mass of revolutionary ferment —
the Revolt of the Women. It is scarcely less widely
spread than the revolt of labour; and its basis is not
very different. Like the wage-earner, the woman
is demanding a fuller share of the good things of
life. In so far as she is a worker already, she is
conscious that she is getting even a lower wage than
the men who are working beside her. ^The great
majority of the sweated workers are women. Again,
take the case of the Civil Service as an example: the
woman clerk gets a lower salary when she does the
same amount of work as her male companion. That
it is often the same amount of work has recently
been illustrated by the fact that the British Postal
Savings Bank Department has been put on a
more economic basis by the substitution of women
for male clerks. Presumably the same amount of
work has to be done by these clerks — the saving
comes from the fact that the women are paid less
than the men.

But there is another element in the women's de-
mands. Not only do they demand an equal wage
for equal work; they are also claiming that they

280

THE PRESENT DEVELOPMENT

shall be allowed to share in the responsibility of the
intelligent work of the world — ^in the organisation
of their community as politicians and voters, in
the professions, in the arts. They ask that the
sex barrier shall be removed from the door to these
things: they ask that their success or failttre shall,
at least, be fairly tested : that the distinction of sex
shall not be considered in the field of work. The
merits of this demand are not in question for the
moment; they are the subject of another of these
essays. We have now merely to register this dis-
content as one of the factors of the present situation.

Beyond this demand for the removal of the sex
barrier in affairs where, they claim, the distinction
of sex has no place, women are also insistently
asking for a wider freedom in that relation of lover
and child-bearer wherein their distinctive sex at-
tributes are concerned. In the relationship of mar-
riage and parenthood, the women claim that they
must be on an equality with men. This demand
will be discussed later on in this essay.

There is a third classification of present-day dis-
content, which perhaps cuts through all the other
classes of discontent; but it is such a definite thing,
and a demand which is so bitterly threatening the
present social structure, that it deserves tabtdation
by itself. It is that wide-spread desire, common
to all classes except the very narrow ones which
are in possession of ample means of living, that
there shall be some fuller realisation of the enjoy-

281

THE GREAT STATE

ment of life. Not only the wage-earners, but also
the salaried men, the struggling professional classes,
the smaller traders with their back to the wall
against competitive stress — all these are becoming
conscious that there is no organic necessity in
social structure why life should be a frantic driving
for the supplying of mere physical needs. The
thoughtful younger members of the middle class
are especially getting impatient when they see all
these possibilities of a generous and dignified career
submerged in a chaotic muddle of social mismanage-
ment and easily avoidable economic errors. They
axe thrown, side by side with the more cruelly
crushed weekly wage-earners, into the pit of social
anarchy; and they are coming to see that their
salvation lies along the same road. And the
root of this restless discontent is that desire for the
sweeter things of life, the consciousness that it
may be something more than ceaseless toil; it is
that vague, impulsive longing to have time to feel
"the wind on the heath" that Sorrow's gipsy
knew. The most insistent things of life — ^the driving
force behind revolutions — are often most vague.
Perhaps it can be expressed as the deare to pro-
tect that individual freedom which is being crushed
out by the present system of capitalist domination.
The present social organisation does not seem able
to offer any satisfaction to the three-noted cry of
discontent which one has attempted to sum up
briefly in the above passages. It is clear that a way

282

THE PRESENT DEVELOPMENT

out must be found. The ideal of the Great State,
expressed in this volume, is one offer of a solution.
Having seen the elements which are making towards
the end of the present social organisation, one now
proceeds to pick up those lines of existing develop-
maits which make it possible and even, one sug-
gests, inevitable that otur social affairs should lead
in the direction of this Great State.

Ill

THE ELEMENTS OF CONSTRUGTION

The first thought that occurs when one considers
the Great State is that such complex social machin-
ery could only be worked by a highly educated peo-
ple. It is almost as much beyond the intelligence
of the present citizens as it would be beyond the
intelligence of a bushman to administer a munic-
ipal constitution. The vast stretches of country,
both physical and intellectual, which would be con-
trolled by the machinery of the Great State will need
for their handling a knowledge of facts and a power
of logical judgment which is certainly not possessed
by the present electorate, or even by its statesmen
and bureaucrats.

It is not so much the good-will that is lacking in
the average citizen of to-day; he is, take him all
round, neither vicious nor anti-social. He is not a
grasping person who desires to rob his fellow-men

283

THE GREAT STATE

of everything that he can take. His desire for gain
is usually a perfectly healthy and legitimate wish
to have a full life; he is only made brutal in its
pursuit because, tmder the laws of the present in-
dustrial organisation, one must often be brutal or
go under. It is not his instincts that are far wrong;
his chief fault is his ignorance. The average man
of to-day is a light-hearted person who does not
trouble to think out the whys and wherefores, or the
precise method by which the largest amount of
happiness and comfort can be obtained. He pre-
fers to enjoy himself rather than to think. This
is, perhaps, not altogether an unhealthy state ©f
mind.

We shall not get much further in the perfecting
of our social organisation until the normal citizen
has been educated to think more quickly and more
accurately. The wise community will consider
that no sum is too high to spend on making the
education of its citizens as full as possible. It is
the basis of every other reform, it is the investment
which pays higher interest than any other enter-
prise. Just as a manufacturer knows that it pays
to have the best machinery, so a wise statesmanship
will maintain that it pays the Nation to have the
finest human machinery. It is scarcely realised
what an enormous waste in productive power is
caused by inefficient and niggardly education. To
send the children from the schools to work as we
send them, imperfectly equipped, to-day, is little

284

THE PRESENT DEVELOPMENT

better than sending a man to dig with a wooden
spade when we might give him an iron one. A
highly educated citizen will be the basis of the
Great State; for only from such material can come
a sufficient volume of demand for intelligent reform,
and only by the hands and brains of such people
will it be possible to produce all that wealth which
is necessary for a civilised life; at least, only by
eflficient workers will it be possible to get this work
done without wearisome toil.

This improvement in education has already made
a definite advance during the last half-century ; and
it is probably the cause of the increasing insistence
of the discontent analysed above. This advance
is produced not merely by the formal school; it is
being accomplished by our newspapers, by the vast
supplies of books, by every instrument which tells
the citizen something about the world in which he
lives. It is useless for the conservative statesmen
(whether Tory or Liberal) to try to resent great
change if they allow the halfpenny paper and six-
penny novel and the shilling classic to exist; and
these agencies are already working for the Great
State. That is the first development which one can
claim to be going in the right direction.

Closely linked with the extension of information,
the widening of horizons, this improvement of men-
tal education, goes the improvement of the physical
health of the community, which again has only to
continue to develop on lines already laid down.

28s

THE GREAT STATE

For example, there is the plaii of providing meals
at the public elementary school. By that system
two immediate ends will be attained : first, the chil-
dren's food will be better in quality and in quantity,
and there will be economy by the cooking on a large
scale instead of the senseless waste of htmdreds of
repeated operations; secondly, the mothers will be
relieved of an appreciable amount of their present
serious overwork in the home. School meals will
thus benefit the health of the mother as well as the
health of her child. At first, perhaps, a charge will
be made for this food; but when it is realised that
healthy children are a State asset, and that the
parents are the tax-payers, then it will soon be held
ridiculous that they should, as parents, pay them-
selves as citizens. It will not be worth the bother
of book-keeping such a simple circulation of money.
The preventive side of public-health adminis-
tration will get unlimited funds when it is realised,
as is rapidly happen ng that it costs less to prevent
disease than to cure it. The recognition of this fact
will mean the more energet c development of a
whole group of reforms which are already on the
statute-books of most civilised states. The sweeping-
away of the slum areas has already been linked to
the beginning of a system of municipal housing and
town-planning; which, in its train, is bringing the
possession of public land and the ousting of the
private landlord. Again, considerations of public
health will be the utilitarian motive behind the

286

THE PRESENT DEVELOPMENT

probable development of municipal bakeries and
municipal milk farms, which will be followed by
the public town farm for the production of the vege-
tables and fruits which will not stand carriage
from a greater State farm. Instead of bearing the
worry of inspecting private cow-sheds and pouncing
on private miUc for analysis, it will dawn on the
most classical of Town Councillors that it would be
better to have the whole process under their control
from the beginning, with the added advaiitage of the
larger profits or cheaper prices which will follow the
larger-scale production. On all matters of this kind
there will be a simple-minded, even if sincere, attempt
to defeat the sdiemes by quoting the abstract
philosophy of "private enterprise." But the major-
ity of the people will see no advantage in defending
abstractions if they have to risk an early death
from contaminated milk and pay a higher price
as the sequence of their philosophy. And it wUl be
the same common-sense practice, rather than ab-
stract reasoning, which will initiate most reforms
of the coUectivist kind we are now discussing.

The department of curative medicine will decrease
in importance as the prevent ve side succeeds in its
work. For the sake of the whole people, even if
no motives of pity intervened, an intelligent com-
munity will continue to provide a fuller series of
hospitals and convalescent homes. Of course, there
will be no charge made on the individual patients.
One would no more ask a fee for the opportunity

287

THE GREAT STATE

to stop the spread of dangerous disease or the loss
of a working member of the commimity, than one
would demand a fee from a tiger if it called at an
Indian village with the request that the headman
would draw all its teeth. Besides, it is almost im-
possible to trace the disease to its responsible source.
Why charge A with the cost of ctiring his children
of consumption when the infection came from B's
children, who caught it from C's? Only those who
have a morbid interest in private detective agencies
could be bothered to work out the problem to its end.
While the citizens are being trained to a higher
standard of mental and physical fitness the machin-
ery of the State will be developing; the process is
coincident, partly cause and partly effect. The
development towards the larger industrial organ-
isations which are inherent in the Great State ideal
has already begun. » Alike on the employer's side,
in the form of Companies and Trusts; and on the
wage-earner's side, in the form of Trade-Unions and
Federations; this process is working itself out be-
fore our eyes. In the shape of the vast co-operative
Societies, productive and distributing, we have a
kind of cross between the two; which, however
incomplete and undemonstrative, is still an admi-
rable object-lesson in social machinery. The present
tendency is for these organisms to grow greater
every year. Although as yet the process remains
based on the capitalist-wage-eamer system, the
machinery itself is not very different from the

288

THE PRESENT DEVELOPMENT

machinery which may conceivably be used in the
Great State. It is, indeed, possible to conceive of
the machinery of the embryo Great State being in a
fairly complete condition, while the resulting wealth
is still credited to the banking accounts of a group
of capitalists. For example, if things went on as
they are at present tending, the railways of England
would soon be under the control of one central
private Railway Board. The same tendency shows
itself in many industries and distributing agencies:
centralisation and a common control are becoming
the normal state of affairs. For example, we read
of Meat Trusts, Cotton-Thread Combines, Tobacco
Trusts, Shipping Amalgamations.

A very slight rearrangement of affairs might
change this capitalist industrial machinery into
Central Departments of a Great State. The . es-
sential change would be that the resulting wealth
would no longer be allotted to the capitalist as such ;
though it may well be that the Great State will
continue to pay large salaries or commissions to the
"captains of industry." But that is an open ques-
tion: it will choose the method which gives the
best results in the production of social wealth and
human character.

This attainment of economy in industrial proc-
esses by large organisation must not by any means
be accepted as an invariable rule, inherent without
exception in the structure of such an ideal as the
Great State. Economy of time and labour will

289 u

THE GREAT STATE

only be sought by that method when the large or-
ganisation does not encroach on the pleastire which
the human mind (in many cases at least) takes in
the more direct personal process which is con-
veniently described as handicraft, as distinguished
from machine production. If it so happens that
the raising of the standard of education and the
decrease of boisterous competition shall produce a
majority of citizens approximating to the type of
William Morris, then it is probable that there will
be a general agreement to sacrifice a part of the time
that might be economised by the machine, and re-
turn to hand labour in some processes, if it gives
a definite return in pleasure to the craftsman.

But in all such departments as transit and dis-
tribution, and in a large number of the industrial
processes (such as the manufacture of raw material^
the making of steel and leather, of uniform cloth
and linen goods, and so on), the claims of the crafts-
men will scarcely be advanced. The general point
to note is that each question of this kind will be
decided on its merit as it arises, on the principle
that the methods of labour must give way to the
rational desires of man, not man to an autocratic
demand for cheap and rapid production. On the
other hand, the human being of the future may
decide that it is better to produce necessities as
quickly as possible, and use the economised time
in some manner which does not yet appeal to the
present mind. The human mind is a subtle thing;

290

THE PRESENT DEVELOPMENT

it would be unwise to dogmatise as to what ii will
or will not want. The citizens of the Great State
may crave every possible moment for work with
the hands; or, again, for the contemplation of
mysticism; or, still again, for the unpremeditated
deKghts of sport and play. Who knows ? Why not
some of every kind?

There is one possible development of industrial
organisation which must be just mentioned before
leaving the subject, though it is impossible to am-
plify it here, for it is a very debatable subject of
which the facts are by no means yet clear. It is
possible that the function of the State as an organiser
of industry may take the form of sub-contracting
work to trade-guilds which are, in fact, Trade-Unions
of the trade concerned. Thus, it is possible that
the State may get its railways built by a guild or
Trade-Union of Railway Engineers; or a town may
get its municipal houses constructed by a guild of
builders; its concerts may be provided by a guild
of musicians, and so on. It may be by some such
method as this that the problem of the relations of
the craftsman and artist to the State may be solved
in certain trades. Under the shelter of a publicly
recognised guild the craftsman may be able to
protect himself from that public dominanbe which he
dreads, not altogether without sound reason. But
here the subject can only be dismissed by this hint
of a possible solution.

So far, we have been discussing possible develop-
291

THE GREAT STATE

ments in the organisation of industrial machinery.
As we have seen, this does not in itself settle the
question of the distribution of the products. It is
scarcely necessary to say that the Great State will
not tolerate the present injustice of this distribu-
tion. In a condition of society where all will have
equal chances of education and opportunity, it is
probable that the resulting work will be more equal
than it is to-day, and there will certainly be a
realisation that every citizen has an innate right
to a minimum share of the social products, which
will be handed over to him without excessive bar-
gaining as to return duties.

This development towards a communal minimum
has already begun in England and most civilised
states by the provision of such things as old-age
pensions, free elementary education, free roads, free
street lighting, free police service, public parks, and
municipal bands to play therein. If roads are free,
there is no possible argtunent against free railways;
if the turnpike gate has been swept away, it is idle
to think that the railway-ticket barrier will remain
eternally sacred. In England free meals at the pub-
lic schools have been already provided in urgent
cases; the process is extending, and it seems almost
inevitable that the provision of all meals for all
children is only a matter of time. From that to
the provision of clothes is a development of practice
and not of principle. Again, the basis of a free
communal medical service is already firmly laid

292

THE PRESENT DEVELOPMENT

down by our school inspection, medical officers of
health, and public hospitals, even if all these de-
partments are at present woefully inefficient. The
Insurance Act recently adopted in Great Britain
is not altogether communal; but the principle of
a State subsidy to ijisure against sickness and un-
employment has been thereby admitted, although
the immediate result to the workers is probably no
present advantage, and they would have been well
advised in this case to wait a little longer for a
completely communal system of general insurance.
It is probable that this commtmal system may
extend until it covers all the elementary necessities
of life. It is probable that a full minimiun of food,
clothing, housing, and travel may, within a compara-
tively short time, become the right of every member
of the Great State. But it does not necessarily fol-
low that Communism will carry us beyond this
minimvun. It is not an ideal which covers the
whole case of the distribution of wealth. It must
never be forgotten that the end of social organisa-
tion is to give the greatest amount of freedom to
the individual. We will not make out a case for
the Great State unless we show that it will make
the individual freer than he is under the Capitalist
system. It will be an advantage to give the citizen
as much as possible of his wages in the form of money
which he can exchange as he pleases, rather than
payments in kind, which he must take, to a certain
extent, as it is offered by the State. At least, he

293

THE GREAT STATE

must have a generous margin for his free use, over
and above his expenses in bare necessities. So the
problem of distribution of wealth will continue
further than the solution by communism. Here
again, the future development is already fore-
shadowed by the existing custom. The graduated
income tax, with its super-tax on all incomes above
a determined figure, has already laid down a system
by which the distribution of wealth can be manip-
ulated in any manner that the community desires.

It is by no means probable that even the most
democratic Great State will insist on equality of
income; those who look forward to this Great State
are not necessarily in conflict with those who say
that personal gain is the most powerful incentive to
work. It will be quite possible, by the method of a
graduated income tax, to pare down the excrescence
of undue wealth and still leave its legitimate in-
equalities. It will almost certainly be by the gradu-
ated and super-income tax that wealth will be most
fairly distributed during the transition period which
we are now considering. The climisy methods of tax-
ing land values and Hquor, tobacco and tea, will be
dismissed as ineffective, as not taxing the super-
rich, but, on the contrary, allowing them to escape
in the confused complexity of the national budget.

But the most radical way to distribute wealth
in a fairer manner is, of course, to pay it out at
the start in fairer wages and salaries. It will be
recognised that if there is any departiire from the

294

THE PRESENT DEVELOPMENT

line of crude equality, then the decision of what is
fair will remain a problem of detail which will need
continual readjustment and cannot be solved by
any hard-and-fast principle. It is probable that it
will work itself out on much the same lines that
it is already being approached. There probably will
be a statutory minimum wage; and the maximum
will be won by some kind of bargaining between
the State Departments and the organised workers
in these trades; there will, in short, be trade-unions,
as there are now.

There is one other already urgent matter of soci^
organisation which covers a vast field, and yet has not
conveniently come under any of the previous heads
of structure of industry or the distribution of wealth
or the promotion of the public health. In truth,
it could be discussed under all these heads, but it
will be clearer to give it a place by itself. One refers
to the position of the Mother. Stated in cold
economic terms, detached from all the true and false
glamour that clusters round her, the Mother is, as
such, a worker engaged in the industry of producing
that most valuable of social wealth, children. The
problem which arises is that under present condi-
tions she is not paid that independent wage, secured
by a contract, which is the legal distinction between
the position of the free worker and the slave. The
Mother, in all normal cases, has merely her main-
tenance according to the standard of her husband's
poation. and in some cases an indeterminate sum,

295

THE GREAT STATE

over and above, at her own disposal beyond house-
keeping. This analogy with the position of a
slave does not necessarily involve the statement
that the mother is treated with cruelty or incon-
sideration, in the ordinary sense of the words. But
it does involve the statement that she is not an in-
dependent unit in the social system. The same
might be said, in a sense, of every worker in a
factory or government office or a shop. But there
is this radical distinction: however badly the
ordinary worker be paid, she gets a definite wage for
more or less definite hours of service; and this is
the basis of an independent life, however insuffi-
cient. Whereas the position of the mother is in-
definite, and decided by sentiment, not contract.

As it is an essential part of the problem of the
Great State to find the method which wiU loosen
the units of the community from unnecessary re-
strictions on their individual freedom, it is, there-
fore, logical that we should attempt to discover a
method by which the largest class of workers, the
mothers, should be given a just and substantial
independence. And no amount of beautiful sen-
timent will be a substitute for a definite wage en-
forceable by law. The question follows: Who is to
fix and pay that wage?

We are not concerned here with the sex relation-
ship, except in so far as it results in a child, the only
point where the community seems to have any right
to interfere. A cahn consideration of all the facts

296

THE PRESENT DEVELOPMENT

leads one to believe that the State as a whole is
far more concerned in the production and control of
children than either the father or the mother, and
that it will be the State, not the father, which will
in future pay the mother the wage due for the work
she expends on the child. The endowment of
motherhood (which has already become the usual
term to denote this idea) wiU be, in brief, the pay-
ment to the mother of a sufificient wage to support
herself and her children during the period she de-
votes to their birth and rearing, and any further
period during which she is incapacitated by her
previous specialisation in child-bearing. It will be
sufficient to cover the necessary outgoing expenses,
and, over and above this, provide a profit to her-
self, at her own free disposal, just as her husband
may have a profit over the expenses of his trade or
profession. In short, it will give mothers a definite
wage for a social service, on exactly the same grounds
that any other work is rewarded.

This system of payment for mothers (which may
be established much sooner than many of us imagine)
would be the longest step towards the coUectivist
community that the world yet has seen. It will
be the more easily carried into practice by the fuller
development of that system of collective house-
keeping which has already begun, and is another
development in the direction of the Great State.
The large co-operative blocks or squares of dwell-
ings, with common dining-rooms, libraries, play-

297

THE GREAT STATE

rooms, nurseries, and kitchens, wUl revolutionise the
position of the mother and, incidentally, tend to a
freedom from excessive domestic work, a freedom
which will do more than anything else to give women
that place in the general work of the world which
thejr are at present demanding. It is not good
that an intelligent woman should give up her whole
time to the care of a single house or of two or three
children, who would be far better in the more varied
society of a larger group, which could be more
economically and efficiently tended by a professional
nurse who chose "that work by preference. All these
developments, eventually, may lead to the disap-
pearance of the family as a social unit. There wiU
probably be no place in the larger-thinking Great
State for the narrow autocracy of the father, con-
trolling the individual rights of either the mother or
the child. Such a unit will only hamper the individ-
ual, without assisting in the wider work of the
State.

Here one must end this brief summary of the ele-
ments of the present social organism which are
tending in the direction of the Great State.

These have been grouped, for convenience, under
the four heads of educational and physical develop-
ment ; the collective organisation of industry ; the dis-
tribution of excessive wealth ; and the development of
commtmal rights; while the case of the public endow-
ment of motherhood has been treated as a special
example which illuminates the whole principle. The

298

THE PRESENT DEVELOPMENT

growth of internationalism might be added to the
list. All these tendencies will, on analysis, be found
to result from the common-sense fact that it is
more satisfactory to accomplish the work of the
world on the co-operative basis of organised effort
than on the lines of anarchical impulse. It may
be far more difficult to organise the former than
to permit the latter; but the manifest possibilities
of the former will continue to stimulate the human
imagination until every difficulty is overcome. The
organisation of that "collective mind" which will
be the basis of the Great State needs an educated
people — a people who will work in unison with the
next-door neighbours, the next parish, the next
county, or the next nation, whenever there is any
advantage to be gained by so doing. The vague,
instinctive, childish antagonisms of class and race,
and the sentimentalities that would veil the essential
brutality, are giving way, generation by generation,
before the more precise and larger-spirited thinking
of the new time.

A PICTURE OF THE CHURCH IN THE
GREAT STATE

BY THE REV. CONRAD NOEL

XI

A PICTURE OF THE CHURCH IN THE
GREAT STATE'

At last I came upon the Cathedral, as we must
now call it, for every group of parishes has its bishop
who is in more than najtne a "father in God" to his
priests and people, and not, as too often in the past,
a feeble person remotely overlording a vast area
and following instead of forming public opinion, his
mind a tangle of concessions and his days a round
of trivialities. The people themselves are nowa-
days consulted in the election of the clergy, a cus-
tom which recalls the choice of Ambrose to the

'This paper takes the place o£ a projected essay upon Religion in
relation to the Great State. The general editors of the book were
unable to arrange for a comprehensive discussion of this important
aspect of human life because they could find no writer at once in-
terested and impartial; and the Rev. Conrad Noel has very obliging-
ly, and under a considerable pressure of other work, sketched a
Catholic ideal of religion in the Great State. Unlike our other
contributors, he has not seen fit to adopt the form of a reasoned
essay, but instead he has made an imaginative description of a
visit to a cathedral in the y«ar 2000 or so, the basis for his forecast
of the future catholic teaching. It is his personal forecast, from
his individual standpoint as a priest of the Church of England; but
many will agree with his spirit who will not approve either of his
doctrine or of his ornaments.

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Archbishopric of Milan by acclamation of men and
women, and even little children, and replaces the
intrigue and secrecy of the past. Many "Congre-
gationalists " welcomed the change, and now exist
within the Church as a guild, with particular methods
and a standpoint of their own. But although there
still remain certain small and independent coteries
of the pious — and perhaps not illogically, for their
forefathers became separatists from the Unity of
Christendom not so much in protest against the
private patron as in championship of the private
congregation, holding no brief for the common peo-
ple, but only for the "people of God" — ^modern sec-
tarianism has lost point and vitality, for the people
believe that the Church is an army for the quicken-
ing and confirming of a Kangdom of Righteousness,
and that through the comradeship of arms men and
women attain a gracious and eternal personality.

To the majority the idea of "free" and competing
churches has therefore become meaningless, and is
only upheld by the sects themselves on the assump-
tion that Christ did not found a Fellowship, but a
number of sky-seeking cliques or comfortable "homes
of the spirit," which do business as drug stores and
insurance companies for a restricted clientele.

Within the Church itself, however, there exists a
great variety of ideas and a greater variety of wor-
ship. There are to be found within its organisation
many companies whose members before the great
changes had been dissenters; each has its shrine or

304

THE CHURCH IN THE GREAT STATE

oratory, and emphasises some one or other aspect of
truth, but without breaking awa5^ in thought or
emotion (heresy) or in organisation (schism) from
the bond and proportion of the Catholic Religion.
In the Cathedral, for instance, there is an oratory
dedicated to Wisdom, containing a library of books,
where people come for study and contemplation; no
public service is held here, but it is the favourite
meeting-place for a Guild of the Friends, who use it
for purposes of silent adoration.

The common worship of the Church is elaborate,
for it is the people's tribute to the Supreme Ritualist
who is making a rich and complex and visible world
with its pageantry of days and nights, and of the
varying seasons. But to many of the guilds the
ceremonial worship makes no special appeal. They
are present at it as an act of Fellowship from time
to time, but find their particular satisfaction in
simpler exercises of the spirit, in which, indeed, the
whole people frequently join.

As to the position and temporalities of the Church,
a controversy is raging. I hear that only last week
a passionate appeal against Establishment was made
from the ptdpit of the Cathedral by one of the
younger canons. The Church had been disestab-
lished, and to some extent disendowed for many
years, and at the present time the churches are
maintained and the Clergy supported in different
ways. In some parishes the priests wt)rk "pro-
ductively" for an hour or so every day, giving their

30s X

THE GREAT STATE

ministry freely. In others they are supported by
a voluntary levy. In others again some small en-
dowment exists. Now, a great number of people,
including some of the most lively and public-spirited,
are in favour of complete establishment and uni-
form State endowment; but the preacher of last
week, who voiced a vigorous minority, had pas-
sionately warned the people against the proposed
official union. The price of just government was
alert criticism and eternal vigilance, and this criti-
cism had hitherto been encouraged by a vigorously
independent Church. I have no notion how this
particular controversy will be settled, but it seems
possible for people to hold opposite convictions on
the subject of temporalities, and, indeed, on many
others, without breaking the bond of Christendom.
The Cathedral Church of All Saints was the old
Tudor structure of my childhood, but where was ihe
Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings?
For there had been added a new Chapel towards the
east, a Council-room to the north, and I noticed
innumerable other alterations, each showing de-
cision and individuality. These acts of "Vandal-
isrp" are defended by the present architects, who
point to the audacities of style in successive periods
of the Middle Ages, a daring clash of individualities
and a supreme harmony. It was as if a Great Peo-
ple, in regaining some secret spring of life, had
fulfilled the Unities by becoming as unconscious of
them as an athlete is Unconscious of a good digestion.

;5o6

THE CHURCH IN THE GREAT STATE

The old niches had their saints restored to them,
and many new shrines were peopled with a strange
medley of figures: St. Catharine of Siena, and her
namesake of Egypt; the Blessed Thomas More and
John Ball, of St. Albans; St. Joan of Arc; the
Blessed John Damien, and hundreds more, many of
them unknown to me, but likely enough images of
martyrs who had fallen in some recent struggle —
artists, artisans, poets, priests, and statesmen. The
inclusion among these shrines of pre-Christian and
non-Christian heroes seemed to me extraordinary,
but the principle of this People is to accent the
vitalities of tradition and let the rest go; I was
reminded that one of their greatest theologians,
St. Thomas Aquinas, had woven Aristotle into the
Catholic fabric, and that St. Augustine had claimed
Plato as a Christian, and that the Catholic Church
had baptised images, temples, ceremonial, gods and
goddesses, into Christ, laying the whole world under
contribution in the building of an Universal Faith,
and adoring an everywhere present God from whom
all good things do come. Even the very Christmas-
trees, with their gleaming tapers and gaudy colotu-s,
which, decorated the aisles, reminded one that the
pecidiarly Christian Feast of December was pagan
in origin. Inclusiveness with them springs from
no mere toleration bom of indifference; but from
an adoration of that one Spirit who has not left
Himself without witness in any comer of the earth.
They borrow freely and absorb into their own re-

307

THE GREAT STATE

ligion elements the most distant and varying; and
the more they borrow, the more unique does this
religion become.

The old gargoyles remain untouched, and new
monstrosities leer down upon the passers-by. Among
them are the faces of pharisees and sweaters of a
past regime. So vividly do certain encrustations
of the structvire record the struggles of a darker
century that they seem like some furious battle
suddenly arrested and turned to stone.

The principal porch was draped in deep - rose
velvet girdled with golden cords, and against the
rosy background stood dark branches of the yew
in wooden tubs. On entering the carved doors, I
was at once impressed with a sense of warmth and
incense and worship. One could not imagine such
a building deserted; it must always have its groups
of devotees; it was surely the temple of a perpetual
adoration.

Everywhere were chapels and pictures and shrines,
gay with flowers and glittering tapers pointing like
spears towards the vast roof. Fixed by small black
chains to the benches and the base of some of the
images were prayers framed in carved wood with
wooden handles. In one such frame was shrined
the saying: "I give nothing as duties. What others
give as duties, I give as living impulses. Shall I
give the heart's action as a duty?"

Many are attracted to the Chapel of "Our Lord
of Health." Round its walls are pictured scenes

308

THE CHURCH IN THE GREAT STATE

of healing from the Gospels and the lives of the
saints, and from the Annals of "secular" medicine.
Crutches and other memorials of past feebleness
adorned its pillars as trophies of divine healing. A
guild for the preservation and spread of health meets
here, and its members include doctors and nurses
and healers of every kind.

The Chapel of Santa Claus is the largest in the
building, and belongs entirely to the children, who
have this Christmas-tide decorated it with artificial
flowers made by themselves and with sprigs of
holly and laurel. The altar was hidden behind a
Bethlehem crib roofed with yellow thatch and
lighted with a hundred candles. Here is held the
daily service of the Catechism, the children choosing
their monitors, and even having some say in ar-
ranging the details of their worship. They are en-
couraged to think for themselves, and as much
praise is given for a question well put as for a ques-
tion well answered.

In my wanderings about the Cathedral I came
upon a certain oratory with many kneeling figures
rapt in prayer, penitents awaiting their turn to
make confession; for the new People is intensely
practical, and their religion is not merely an affair
between the private soul and the private God, but
between the individual and a God-penetrated So-
ciety and its minister. They believe that Man
has not only power on earth to commit sin, but
power on earth to forgive sin, and they glorify God

309

THE GREAT STATE

Who has ' ' given such power unto men. ' ' They think
in terms of fellowship: goodness is that which helps;
evil is that which injures the community. The most
secret vice by decreasing or deflecting the energies
of service is a sin against the whole family of God,
and requires the forgiveness not only of God, but
of man. In an anti-social age everything from re-
ligion to business had become distorted, neurotic,
excessively introspective, but now the sacraments
were again the witnesses and effectual signs of social
grace. The people generally has regained a robust
conscience, genuinely sorry for its stupidities, its
cruelties, and its egomanias; but ready to make a
clean breast of them and shake them off. Religion
nowadays is more deeply rooted in the eternal
realities of human nature than ever before, and has
inspired people with the paradox of humility and
audacity which one sees in adventurous lovers and
all who drink deep of the fountains of life. They feel
the things eternal underlying the things temporal,
and are in close converse not with a Jesus and Saints
of a dead past, but with a Jesus and Saints who, by
their heroic struggle as recorded in the past, have
won to that heaven which is close at hand. Far
from denying a future beyond death, they hope for
it, and already by their friendship With those who
have passed through its gate live in "the rapture
of the forward view. ' ' They laugh good-humouredly
at the sick people of the twentieth century who
blamed the Church of their day for not lusting for

310

THE CHURCH IN THE GREAT STATE

Hfe, and themselves were so little in love with it
that they rejoiced at the prospect of annihilation.
But when convalescence came, there canie back
with it the lust of everlasting life. To work for
the good of the race is excellent enough, but the
work wiU gain in vigour and enthusiasm when it is
no longer the service of a race of summer flies who
are to perish in a few moments, but devotion to en-
during human beings with the infinite possibilities
of infinite worlds.

Had this People developed a new ethical sense,
or to what extent are they merely reverting to an
earlier standpoint for a time engulfed in the abysses
of Christo-Commercialism? Two or three things
stand out clearly: they worship no barren and ab-
stract deity called Morality; morality was made for
man, not man for morality. They love and worship
people, and not principles; their religion is the in-
timacy and fellowship of friends; their casuistry
springs from the fount of worship.

Their teaching of the children is firm and simple,
and meets with swift response,, for it rings true to
some natural grace in childhood, which is always
present in some de^ee or other, however deflected
or overlaid or intermixed with alien elements. It
was through my presence at the daily "Catechism"
that I began to see that they are convinced of the
fundamental soundness of human nature and of
the divinity of every human birth. Centuries back
this conviction had been acknowledged as an es-

3"

THE GREAT STATE

sential doctrine of the Christian Church, after the
long battle between ApoUinarius and S. S. Hilary
and Athanasius. And for all this, they do not
minimise the distortions of mind and soul. Evil and
grace are both acknowledged, but the generosities
of grace are suggested as natural to man, and evil
is regarded as the inhuman interloper. This is well
illustrated in their use of the word "lust," which has
recovered its original significance of the natural
bodily desires, hunger, thirst, sex attraction, energy,
rest, recreation. Lusts are dark and distorted only
when uncontrolled and indulged to the injtuy of the
community or the self; hunger becomes gluttony;
thirst becomes drunkenness, and physical desire un-
chastity. In this connection they teU the old story
of the shipwrecked swimmer encumbered by his sack
of gold, asking if the drowning man owned the gold
or the gold owned him. The Church rejects the
doctrine which would treat the gold, or the hunger,
or the sex need as inherently evil, and children are
thus taught to distinguish between the use and abuse
of those natural desires which are, in fact, believed
to have in them some positive element of goodness.
The physical appetites are likened to high-spirited
horses, valued for their very lustiness : the business
of the driver is not to destroy, but to control them,
and this is also the business of life's charioteers.
The Church has thus reverted to and is now develop-
ing a healthy and more adventurous element in its
tradition. » Complete suppression of some one or

312

THE CHURCH IN THE GREAT STATE

other desire is counselled in exceptional cases, and
such a policy is illustrated from the anti-Oriental
standpoint of the New Testament/ This essential
but exceptional abstinence is believed to have its
attendant danger, because the converted sensualist
may invite into the temple of his soul seven other
demons more deadly than the first, for drink has
slain its thousands, but pharisaism its tens of
thousands. The puritan convert too often devoted
the remainder of a maimed^ life to preaching the
gospel of dismemberment among the sound and
healthy. The leader in so un-catholic a crusade
shotdd surely have been the fox of the fable who,
wisely exchanging a tail for a life, is forever counsel-
ling total abstinence from tails as the duty of all
members of his magnificent species. The present
casuistry does not discount the discipline of pain;
but no road is either to be chosen or avoided for
its painfulness, the way of the cross being sacred,
not because of its difficidties, but because of its pur-
pose. Neither pain nor pleasure is regarded as an
end in itself, and it is pointed out that the Christ
said of Himself not, I am come that they might have
pleasure, nor, I am come that they might have pain,
but "I am come that they might have life." They
often quote the story of the artist whose soul's de-
sire was to paint a joyous picture and bequeath it
to posterity. But he lived in a Calvinist city, and
the government threatened him with crucifixion if

' Matthew y : 30. ^ Mark ix : 43.

313

THE GREAT STATE

he dared to paint it. If there be any other way out,
the artist will take it, and he cries : " If it be possible
let this cup pass from me"; but he cannot play
the traitor to that joy within him, which he is to
scatter among men, and for its sake he is content to
go the way of the cross; and the blood of the martyr
becomes the seed of the Church.

Deliberate effort towards fvdness of life is counted
praiseworthy and necessary, for the convalescent
must take his exercise, however painful and tmgainly
the effort may be, though this very ungainliness
should remind him that he is still in some measiure
tuider the dominion of disease. When eventually
the convalescent soul by conscious effort has regained
health, actions spring spontaneously from a rich and
genial human nature, and he tmderstands the mean-
ing of the light burden and the easy yoke.

This naturalness and spontaneity they see in the
saviours of men, but everything they think and feel
about the saviours, they think and feel as a possi-
bility for themselves. Jesus Christ seems to them
more human than humankind ; so they call Him di-
vine. He is supposed to hold the key of an over-
mastering (eternal) life which is to be the heritage
of men as they emerge from the half-formed, mal-
formed sub-human life with which they are often
enough content, and become Man. They speak of
Jesus Christ as the first fruits of the human harvest,
and as the first-bom from the dead.

There was a good deal of controversy in the

314

THE CHURCH IN THE GREAT STATE

twentieth century about the "finality" of Jesus;
but this doctrine is no longer obtruded, possibly not
even believed, not at least in the paralysing sense
of past centuries. They do not separate him from
mankind, nor from the heroes of men; it is men
who, by their lack of life, separate themselves from
Man.

They feel that the life of Christ, as contained
even in their written fragments, is bafifling in its
many-sidedness, its richness, and its ferocity, its
gwiiality and its austerity, its tenderness and its
audacity; but rather is it His life as a present God
illustrated in that localised and limited life of the
past, which is adored. The orthodox theologians,
both past and present, have not expected to find
everything in the written pages, but look for the
extension of a life once manifest in Galilee in the
subsequent lives of the family of mankind. They
look to the life of the good time coming, the life of
the golden age, "the world to come." Some writers
have spoken of this consummation as "The Second
Coming." They point to certain sayings in the
scriptures as containing in germ the later doctrine
of the Catholic Church on these points of faith.*

They do not pretend to find in the written gospels
of the Christ after the Flesh, the God-life of man-
kind drawn out, extended, illustrated in every de-
tail and from every angle. For they have never
been bibliolaters. They have never thought that

'Luke vi: 40; John xiv: 12.
31S

THE GREAT STATE

ink or parchment or written words could possibly
give full expression to the Word, Who Is God. "^ Nor
do they conceive it possible that Jesus of Nazareth,
the Very Man of Very Man and Very God of Very
God, in a ten months' ministry, or at most three
years, could live the long life of the perfect dramatist,
the perfect artist, the perfect singer, the perfect
agriculturalist, the perfect bricklayer, the perfect
dancer, the perfect statesman, the perfect mother.

All art is not only self-expression but self-limita-
tion, and the art of God the Creator implies a re-
striction, in which may possibly be found the key
to the problem of evil. They believe that God the
Word or the "God Expressed" limited Himself
within the strong channel of a forcible life narrowed
to a particular purpose, but that as he lay a babe in
his mother's arms he filled and still fills the world
with his presence, ever striving to express himself
within the limitations of this or that heroic being;
hence the importance of seeing God in men and
women, and of the worship of the saints, no mere
copies, but originals, distinct and multitudinous
facets of that jewel of great price which is God.

But the historic Christ is the norm and tllustra;
tion of the life of God and Man, the ever-present
God inspiring men with the same secret of vigour
and originality. The saints are taken as illustra-
tions of the million-sidedness of God, latent and sug-
g^ed in the life of Jesus Christ. As to images
and pictures, their scriptures suggest that the idol

316

THE CHURCH IN THE GREAT STATE

is in itself a thing indifferent, for it may be the
splendid representation of some heroic god, or the
dark fashioning of a devil, whose service is that
"Avarice which is Idolatry." What gods of wood
or stone you make matters not ; the God that mat-
ters is the god you set up in your heart. The
Calvinists never made a stone image of the thing
they worshipped. If they had, the children would
have run shrieking from its presence. None the
less were they idolaters. It is hardly necessary to
record the difference between the paintings and
images in the churches of to-day and the "religious
art" of the Dark Ages.* The gentlemanly drawing-
room Christs, the simpering Madonnas, the feeble
self-immolating saints are things of the past, for
the portraits and images are brave and heroic, and
the prevailing conceptions have revolutionised re-
ligious art.

In the huge nave Matins was being sung. Many
of the Jewish psalms had been retained in the
Liturgy, but to the Christian psalter had been added
blank verse and free rhythms of later date. The
chanting by men's voices sounded to me archaic, and
I was better able to appreciate the hymns set to folk-
melodies and sung by children. It seemed strange
that the first lesson should be selected from a
modem writer, but the second was from the New
Testament. People were still coming into the nave,
bringing their chairs from a stack by the west doors,

• Eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries.
317

THE GREAT STATE

and sitting where they liked, except that a pompous-
looking beadle, gorgeously arrayed, kept a wide
alley for the great procession. The decorations
presented a daring scheme of colour. The tall
pillars were wreathed with evergreen and many-
coloured silken materials; between them stood the
bright Christmas-trees, and over the entrance to
Chancel loomed the Rood with its Calvary. But
for the figure of the Crucified, and for the pro-
cessional Cross,, I saw neither crucifix nor cross
throughout the building. It was through the grave
and gate of pain, as represented on the Calvary
screen, that we passed into the joyous life beyond.
The wearying repetition of the same syinbol was
held to mark the impoverishment and decadence
of the Catholic idea. At each festival an appro-
priate image would be placed upon the high altar,
or some picture htmg above it. But for this image
flanked by two candles spiked in candlesticks of
crystal and silver, the long altar-table was bare of
ornament and the eye was attracted not to the
lights upon and above it and clustering at its sides,
but to itself, enfolded in a sun-like frontal blazing
with jewels. The chancel was hung with flags,
faded and tattered trophies of brave crusades. On
these flags were painted various emblems, the wheels
of Catharine, the gridiron of Laurence, the lions of
Mark, the spears of George. ■ I could see, from my
seat by one of the pillars, a side chapel with a sim-
ple stone altar with two candlesticks of ebony, and

318

THE CHURCH IN THE GREAT STATE

between them an ivory Christ, like a young Greek
shephord, bearing on his shoulder not a lamb, but
a goat, a symbol of the final restitution of aU things.
Before this altar, priests and laymen were vesting,
and here were congregated boy and girl choristers,
acolytes, taperers, robed, some in white, others in
purple and blue and gold. A surpliced priest ap-
proached the lamp hanging before the high altar
and brought light down among the crowd, the men
and women in front lighting the tapers they held
in their hands and passing on the light from neigh-
bour to neighbour, from row to row, tmtil the whole
building was a swaying forest of fire. This cere-
mony symbolised the fulgent enthusiasm of com-
radeship, kept ablaze by the handing-on of the torch
from neighbour to neighbour and from one genera-
tion to another. To have witnessed this wonderful
sight almost compensated me for the midnight mass
of Christmas Eve that I had missed, the mass at
which nearly the whole district made communion,
and which opened with the procession of wise men
with their gold and incense and myrrh and shepherds
with their lambs. This function had been pre-
ceded by a drama of Bethlehem, acted under the
huge vaulting of the Middle Tower by people of
the town and their children, a drama in which
humour and solemnity jostled one another in strange
congrtiity.

The Communion Service was in many respects
like the service of my childhood, but instead of the

319

THE GREAT STATE

negative commandments of the Jews had been
substituted the positive commandments of the
Christians, and in the prayers for the Great State
there has been inserted a memorial of the Confeder-
acy of Nations composing it. The doctrine of the
Blessed Trinity, or of the One-in-many, runs through
their whole conception of life, suggesting not only
the complex personality of the individual, the
trinity of the holy family in father, mother, child,
but the international and composite imity of the
State, the many nations gaining and not losing in-
dividuality by each generous advance towards
World-fellowship, by every casting-off of insularities
and parochialisms.

Just as the many nations are confederate in the
State so are the parishes confederate in the national
church, and the national churches in the inter-
national Catholic Church, sending representatives
to the great assemblies at which presides the su-
preme pontiff, the President of the Eucumenical
Councils of the Catholic Democracy. In the prayer
for the Whole Church, mention was made of all its
officers chosen and consecrated for various functions
and administrations in the same.

Beautiful as is the singing of the Gospel from a
lectern down among the people, and the little pro-
cession which precedes it, I was more impressed by
the procession of the Offertory or Offering of the
Fruits of the Earth, a procession which, winding
in and out among the people, gathers some of them

320

THE CHURCH IN THE GREAT STATE

in its train; the laity bringing the offerings of
Nature and the works of man's hands towards the
altar; following them comes the deacon, his hands
muffled in a long silk veil, bearing the sacred bread
and wine, universal emblems of the products of art
and nature.

Although this People insists on the eternal values
of the present life, it seems to be inspired by a con-
viction of an after life transformed beyond the
capacity of our present apprehension. They do
not beHeve that the dissolution of death either de-
stroys personality or with miraculous suddenness
transmutes it. The majority of men undergo a
process of purification, being cleansed by the fires
of conscience fanned in the furnace of the terrible
God of Love. They do not think that this process
necessarily takes place in the arena of this earth;
reincarnation is only one of many legitimate specu-
lations, and by no means a popular one, for theo-
logians realise that this earth is in size a mere speck
of dust in the vast network of worlds that form the
Universe. They no longer dogmatise as to place,
but as to process. They teach that a few pure and
coiirageous souls pass after death into the over-
mastering life of God's Omnipresence, and find their
heaven in co-operation with Him in the work of
creation. Our entrance into this heaven is barred
by stupidity and corruption, and for all there exists
as a dread possibility, the outer darkness and the
weeping and gnashing of teeth, though of not even

321 y

THE GREAT STATE

the Judases of the earth are we to think of that
possibiUty as a certainty. The presence of the
whole company of heaven seems to pervade and
invigorate the people, and prayer to all saints and
for all souls is a never-ending fount of energy in
the life of the Nation.

From the moment when the Child is initiated by
Baptism into the life of the Fellowship until the
last rites of the Church are administered in the hour
of death, the sacraments of friendship are his nourish-
ment, and the graces of fellowship uphold him.
Present at mass from earliest childhood, he makes
his Communion only after having received the
Sacrament of Confirmation, that effectual sign of
the royal priesthood of mankind, "The Coming of
age of the Christian." In the Sacrament of "Holy
Order" some are consecrated as delegates and
spokesmen of the whole human priesthood, and in
this parish Mass of Christmas one felt that the Con-
secration of the bread and wine at the hands of the
bishop was not the act of a sacerdotal caste, but of
all the people; for, as the great bell toUed at the
supreme moment, not only the congregation, but
the whole country-side was linked together in that
act of adoration, when the everywhere present
God is made manifest in the friendship of those
who eat and drink in common, and in the nourish-
ment and energy, the gaiety and intoxication of life,
as symbolised by the life-giving bread and the genial
wine.

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THE CHURCH IN THE GREAT STATE

In spite of what might be called the pantheistic,
or more accurately the polytheistic, elements in
the religion of the Great State, it all roots down into
an intense conviction of the Being of the One God.
The ethics are lively and practical, because Morality
is not worshipped as a fixed and abstract divinity,
but is looked upon as dependent on and in relation
to people. It is kept from becoming static and
stagnant by the Communion of Saints. Behind
these innumerable personalities of sinners and saints,
personalities ordinary and extraordinary, there is
believed to exist the ever-present and personal God.
The term "personal" is bravely used, not because
His Being does not escape the net of all language,
but because He is felt to be in converse and com-
munion with men. Transcending personality, He
must yet be appropriately expressed in the highest
terms they know, the terms of their own humanity
in its most human moments. For the Word became
flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory^,
as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace
and truth.

THE GROWTH OF THE GREAT STATE

BY HERBERT TRENCH"

' Sometime Fellow of All Souls' College, Oxford, and late
Director of the Haymarket Theatre ; and author of " Apollo and
the Seaman," etc., etc.

XII
THE GROWTH OF THE GREAT STATE

Two questions confront us.

Is the existing form of state likely to transcend
its borders? Let us survey, by a fragmentary glimpse
over history, the ancient majestic process of polity-
making ; examine what one form of polity bequeaths
to another ; and take account also of the profound
underlying unity that the whole process implies.

Next ; is there a test of true growth, in that pro-
cess of human societies ; a touchstone and assay of
their prosperity, a check on false values and on in-
human changes ? Yes, there is the Family, the first
glowing germ-cell. By this cell, as I shall show,
in the ninth section of this paper, the health of the
polity stands, to live or die.

We do not know why the universe is what it is.
We do not even know Man as he is ; his nature is
only being gradually unfolded. But two centres of
being, namely Life and Mind, jut out and assume
for us incomparable clearness. In the human body,
they emerge as heart and brain. All hangs on the

327

THE GREAT STATE

interaction of these. In men dying, the pulsation
of the muscle of the heart will starve all other
organs — feet, hands, organs of generation, stomach
— in order to feed, with its last exhausted flutter,
the consciousness of the brain. But these two
centres are but surface-indexes to profound universal
forces, acting through human society. Therein we
see Life and finite Mind, issuing from and moving
in the region of Anangke — that is, of Nature un-
guided by finite Mind. Now Life and Mind we judge
to be different stages in the growth of an "omni-
potential principle, which draws its whole growth
and content from its environment." ^ The two
forms of Life and Mind are both always being urged
by the pressure of this principle to frame wholes,
totalities. Life and Mind have jointly the remark-
able power of successively crystallising, as it were,
round haphazard points, into organisms, selves,
families, polities of all kinds. By polity I mean any
human group organised by finite Mind.

II

The aims of civilisation, or polity-making, may
seem confused, but are not so. They are the preser-
vation, in reservoirs of ever-increasing group-con-
sciousness and range, of Life and Mind, in a steady
relationship to each other, and the training of them
both to increased force and completeness. These
reservoirs have been successively organisms,

> Driesch, quoted by B. Bosanquet.
328

THE GROWTH OF THE GREAT STATE

families, polities ; which may dissolve, but always
leave behind them spheres or basins of civilisation,
out of which polities emerge and re-emerge, like
bubbles from the moist ground round a spring.

The central principle of things requires a cease-
less effort after whole-making, as in arts and con-
quests ; and this ultimately implies, I believe, soul-
making. For this purpose a ceaseless interaction
goes on between the two centres. Life and Mind, as
it were foci of an ellipse, as they move, oscillating,
in age-long northward and southward rhythms, as
well as in eastward and westward rhythms, of ferti-
lising invasion over the surface of the globe. So the
moist ground-area of the spring, we shall see, goes
on enlarging.

m

First, towards polity-making, from cave, marsh,
lake, move Life and Mind, possibly out of promis-
cuous or matrilinear groups, into the Cyclopean
patriarchal Family, the main human unit, with its
naked primal economic necessities — food, shelter,
warmth, procreation ; Life always creeping ahead,
always to be followed by wellings-up of Mind, in-
tensifying the Life of the unit — the Family.

It is in an apparently spiral vortex-whirl that
Life and Mind, the kindred and antagonistic allies,
acting through the sex-love and jealousy of a sire,
create the Family, and thence the Polity.

In the sea-octopus, found at a depth of fifteen

329

THE GREAT STATE

thousand feet, shines an eye. The upper half of
this eye is an organ of vision, the lower half an actual
lamp, projecting light on external masses. Both
halves radiate backwards and inwards currents of
consciousness within the creature. These are the
triple functions of Mind. Mind reflects the rami-
fying movement, the fern-like expansion of the fibrils,
veins, tendrils, and armours of its precursor and
fellow-centre. It intensifies consciousness, defen-
sive and formative. In the human. Mind embodies
Life in preservative habits, customs, morals, totem
food-societies, by co-operative magic and religion.
Next it adds the great step. Record; and this Record,
tide -mark of life, scored in material more enduring
itself. Mind learns perpetually to diffuse.

To diffuse, to interpenetrate, to absorb the out-
ward and project the inward — this is the special
power of Mind. True inwardness is thus the true
grasp and absorption of the outward, and the pro-
jection of so much as may be of the inward. Mind
renders all things transparent, as the soak of essen-
tial oil renders transparent, for the operating sur-
geon, the tissue and cellular structure of bone. And
as Life moves forward in its shell-forming and polity-
making it is not only quickened in its pace by Mind ;
it is affected deeply in its own nature. And there-
fore the polities which Life and Mind jointly create
are more and more thoroughly suffused with Mind.
Mind in its turn grasps and intensifies more and
more of Life. There follows in the polity, therefore,
increase of the brood-care which we call education ;

330

THE GROWTH OF THE GREAT STATE

increases of self-guidance and group wisdom ; and,
since the very principle of Mind is diffusion, there
is an increase in the range of the external structure of
polity. Man does not invent the State only to satisfy
the impulse of the Family. He feels the impulse
because his natural destination is the State, as Aris-
totle implied. This majestic process thrusting up
from some source unknown (but whose unity we
fragmentarily apprehend), more and more numerous
centres of nerve-consciousness to the surface of the
globe, appears to be the expansion of some pro-
found and universal root of Self-dominion.
This is the open secret of the world.

IV

In this process the Life-centre and the Mind-
centre in any polity are not allowed by the omnipo-
tential principle to fall far apart. Where they do
not interact the polity-forming current ceases, a light
vanishes, some low form of organism, of which all
we know is that it has innumerable nervous centres
and some sort of philosophy for a brain, crumbles
and disappears. There is a decomposition into
smaller forms ; the bubble of the polity relapses into
inferior communities, the germ-cells of scattered
families ; and soul-making by that reservoir stops.
Yet the reservoir has bequeathed something: the
bubble of the Polity has relapsed, but the moist
ground of the spring, the diffused sphere of
Civilisation, remains larger than it was before.

331

THE GREAT STATE

Next observe that, although a vast latitude is
allowed as to conditions of Life, and a vast toler-
ance as to the scope, products and activities of
Mind, yet the making of the organised reservoir,
the Polity, ceases when either Life or Mind receives
mortal injury. The law is that Mind may extend
and ramify its universalisings from basin to basin of
civilisation, provided that no fatal injury is done to
Life, its basis in forming the Familial Unit. The
final criterion of the health of the polity is found in
the health of that Family for which society came
into being. It is obvious that where the primal
necessities of this unitary cell are not satisfied,
there must follow a dwindling, a kind of cancerous
break-down of the cellular tissue of the reservoir,
as penalty for the infringement of the law of inter-
action of Life and Mind. If the area of harm be
wide enough, the reservoir perishes ; and reservoir-
making is [begun outside, round fresh foci. And
clearly the reservoir may perish in another way : it
may fail under the impact of intenser Life outside.
But these impacts usually infuse fresh blood ; are
absorbed and revitalise the reservoir, as the
southern Chinese polity in its cul de sac was
revived and animated by Turki, Mongol, and
Manchurian blood from the north, Gaul by the
Frankish tribes, or Britain by the Saxon invasion.

But the point to be observed is that, whether the
reservoir or polity decays from internal or external
causes, it bequeaths greater consciousness to the
globe. Its inventions have always overflowed its

332

THE GROWTH OF THE GREAT STATE

borders and remained in the common heritage.
The result, therefore, on the whole, during the
recorded history of the last twelve thousand years,
from the time when Nippur drew into a village of
reed-huts among the marshes of the Euphrates, has
always been the formation of larger spring-areas
of civilisation, which contain small sparsely-sown
cominunities with a tradition of finer Mind. Out
of these spring-areas arise larger polities of coarser
structure, in which the small communities with
traditions of finer Mind have a gradual influence of
permeation ; so that the ultimate level of civilisation
and the ultimate level of Mind, in the new large
polities, is higher than in the old ; the two main dif-
fusing forces being Trade and Thought, issue of the
Life-centre and the Mind-centre respectively. For
Mind has the property of never forgetting its own
old communal levels; it to-day remembers the level,
for instance, which it had in the Athenian polity.
Therefore in the new polity of larger area formed by
Trade and Thought there will be a steady tendency
for Mind to rise in the polity. There will be ulti-
mately, after an interval of relapse, a more compre-
hensive survey and level of conception than in the
old. Life is ever being sheltered by wider inter-
courses and under an ampler roof; and behind both
Life and Mind there is no long pause in the motion
of the Omnipotential Principle. Stagnancies, fluc-
tuations, delays, recessions of the tidal force, it is
true, there always will be ; black retrograde periods
such as that of the fifth century of our era, when the

333

THE GREAT STATE

Eastern and Western halves of the Roman Empire
were a prey to Goths, Vandals, and the Huns of
Attila. Yet, looked at broadly, if the tidal force
has receded out of one reservoir, it has generally
been to advance farther and higher elsewhere in an-
other. From climax to climax^ crest to crest, of the
eight known civilisations, the wave-length period
seems to be about fifteen hundred and thirty-five
years. But the main depth and body of Mind in its
commonalty, upon and out of which these waves are
formed, seems steadily to deepen over the world.

Thus the first foci of Life in Families crept out
of the mists round the common Fire of a village.
Through millions of years, from periods pre-glacial
and pliocene, human life had risen to the cave-life
of the Veddahs, and then to the village. Nomad
peoples tended to fail, as the hairy forest peoples
tended to fail, in comparison with agricultural and
settled tribes of the open country. Why ? Because
the settled folk could more eflfectively guard and
feed the Family. Outside the village were the forma-
tive pressures of Anangke, duress of famine and fear.
Next, protection is afforded to the huddling villages
by the City, of which the root-idea is Fortress.
The life of the Polis means life guarded within a city
walled. But the Fortress, larger than the village,
requires more food. Fbrtress becomes Market. The
City requires a larger catchment-area of produce or
of prey. It needs also roads through the outer

334

THE GROWTH OF THE GREAT STATE

regions of Anangke. But primitive waters are
roads ready-made, and easier roads than land-roads.
River-dwellings on piles also afford protection from
wild beasts. The first civilisations are therefore
the three River Civilisations, Babylonian, Egyptian,
and Assyrian, in the valleys of Euphrates, Nile, and
Tigris. Their polities are monarchies ; pyramidal
also in religion ; and their Kings are sole ultimate
intermediaries between the families of the people
and their god. In each of these River Civilisations
the Polity, in the fostering hot current between
Life and Mind, swells — hive-like — honey-combed
marvellously within, into intricate galleries of crafts
and castes. But e^^en in remotest epochs of early
<;ivilisation we find the stability and size of the
Polity proportionate to the rank it accords to Mind.
The three-staged Ziggurat, or mountainous stage-
towers of unburned brick (faced with kiln-dried
bricks laid in bitumen), and bearing on their sum-
mits the abode of the Babylonian god, had always,
in a great outlying building, their attendant Library.
The Babylonian libraries, certainly far more than
six thousand years before Christ, like the sub-
sequent Egyptian libraries, contained text-books,
school exercises, tables of mathematical formulae, as
well as archives of temple and kingdom. In those
River monarchies it was Mind that irrigated the
desert. Mingling with the Life-centre, it fused and
threw up the great composite structures Art and
Religion. Religion, at first a mixed fear of ghosts
and a hope in the power of ancestral spirits, finally

335

THE GREAT STATE

expressed Man's sense of the relation of his polity
and of his own soul to the Infinite power. Religion
also now lifted the old local tribal gods into their
niche in ■a system ; into their footing in a hierarchy ;
reflecting the shape of the hive in the spiritual dome
of a Pantheon for the gods. The River Polity thus
helped to spread the conception of one God. For
instance, the unifying of the forty-two nomes, or
transverse river-provinces of the Nile, under the
cobra-headed Pharaonic crown, tended to draw
their various tribal animal cults into a theocracy of
one King-God who was supreme.

In Egypt, Neter, the supreme God, remote and
almighty, indifferent to man, deputed the manage-
ment of human affairs to a crowd of minor deities.
Sky, Heaven, Nile, Earth, Sun, and so on ; and to a
myriad of Spirits. But, at least three thousand five
hundred years before Christ, out of this crowd of
animal and physical deities a unique company of
five gods and goddesses emerged, with the good
culture-hero and king, Osiris, at their head. What
is the peculiar distinction of this divine group ? It
is precisely that they alone are human, incarnate, a
sort of holy family. Isis is the sister and devoted
wife of Osiris, coveted by Set, his evil brother, who
murders Osiris, and poisons his son, Horus, be-
gotten by Osiris after death. Osiris, risen again
victorious, becomes God of the Moon, of the Dead,
of Justice, Truth, Virility, and Immortality. Isis
shone as the perfect woman, ideal wife and mother,
a kind of Virgin Mary. This group, by far the

336

THE GROWTH OF THE GREAT STATE

most enduring, lofty, and central form of divinity
among the Egyptians, appealed to the affections
and the domesticity of the people, and took, mark
you, the form of a family.

Art, the other mixed structure, also arose (like
Religion, expressing the whole emotional Man) in
poetry, painting, and sculpture ; while pure Mind,
in Experiment and Record, sowed the germ of the
sciences. Record, in the shape of law, ramified
with the honeycomb ; human status was slowly ex-
changed for contract ; the ancient familial blood-rank
of a child, class or estate, was slowly exchanged
for specialised relationships between individuals,
defined for practical purposes on clay tablet or
papyrus. At last all the streamlets of these
specialised relationships are channelled in the
spreading arteries of coded law, as of Khammu-
rabi's Code. Simultaneously, disciplines of all kinds
necessary for ritual, caste and craft and war, appear
and are recorded. Every social channel has to be
lined against the inner friction of its stream. Every
repugnant task which is necessary to welfare of
Family or Polity must be enforced. Every thrust
outward of human growth must have a hardened
surface, armoured as the drill for tunnelling. Thus,
through the eff"orts of countless centuries, are born
the inward and outward indurations — each a sign
of social growth, inward or external. And, of
course, added to religious and labour class-dis-
ciplines appears, when the state strikes, the massed
discipline of its armies.

337 z

THE GREAT STATE

Of the whole ancient Polity, as Richelieu said
later of the modern, the apparent essential is
Finance; the real, Protection — collection and dis-
tribution of taxes for protection of the worker's
means of livelihood, which depended on the River.

VI

But, with the size, wealth, and complexity of the
State Polity, its group of wants must expand ; its
tentacles of ship-and-caravan traffic are pushed
farther afield to gather new luxuries in new seas,
outer lands, beyond the range of self-sufficiency and
self-guidance. We know, for instance, that in the
third century a.d. a certain Chinese outpost frontier-
officer, near Khotan in East Turkestan, was using
Greek gems to seal his official documents. Just so
a thousand years later, Marco Polo found China,
under the Mongol Kublai Khan, even in her signal
isolation behind the Gobi desert, the sea and the
Pamirs and highest mountain ranges of the world,
flooded with Persian luxuries and Greek ideas.

And so, far earlier, even the River-civilisations
found themselves diffused. Impelled by the omni-
potential principle towards greater completeness,
the River-civilisations, by the traffic of their many-
mouthed deltas, overflowed and were suffused into
the larger Sea-civilisations — those of states grouped
round the Mediterranean; Phoe:nician, Cretan,
Hellenic, the last a shifting league of free demo-
cracies and oligarchies. Athens arises, shining

338

THE GROWTH OF THE GREAT STATE

exemplar for our times, served by all her citizens,
not by deputy or merely by earning a livelihood
in special trades, but by personal service in folk-
assembly; all citizens acting as judge and jury;
all citizens as soldiers, with no relationships to the
state discharged by proxy, so that each man's body
and sense allied in loyalty actively to create her
beauty and sustain her glory.

Next the Roman central energies radiated, round
a Mediterranean turned Roman lake, and spread
undulating power about the Capitol, as far as from
the Tyne to the Tigris.

To-day the Sea-civilisations are being succeeded
by the Ocean-civilisations; federations extending
around the Atlantic and Pacific basins, inevitably
to be knitted by the interpenetrations and depen-
dencies of trade and thought, by labour, science, and
the intercourse of universities (forming a complex
of Life and Mind centres under the pressures of
Anangke) into one richer civilisation ; even utilising
the Negroid and enveloping the globe.

Yet in the Greater Polity, towards which we tend,
all the old intermediate forms of polity, with most of
their internal class and craft disciplines, harmonised
by synthesis, will probably remain as absorbed and
subordinated forms, national and municipal. These
intermediate forms will contribute structural
stability ; and, preserving, each in its rank, ancient
ideals of perfection (as Liverpool might take Athens
for pattern), may long and nobly thrive, utilising
the personal service of all our citizens.

339

THE GREAT STATE

VII

But to turn back for a moment. Why, if Mind
renders Polity stable through its gift of Record
and consciousness, did the Mind of Athens form
no empire ? Why did the Hellenic leagues fail to
endure ? The Greeks seemed specially to have come
into existence to intensify and express what I have
called the Mind-centre in polity-making. They are
our masters in polity-making still. They wrote its
very grammar. They made Athens a walk of free,
probing, analytic, experimental mind ; washing into
the inlets of all life, disengaging the ideal and
essence under all appearance. Their greatest plays
are sheer rebellions of the ironic protagonists of
Mind against Anangke and the settled status of the
Olympians. The very decadence and rhetorical
deliquescence of their famous schools of discussion
coldly furnished forth later an organisation for that
Alexandrian university which became the prototype
of all mediaeval universities, and of our own splendid
foundations in that kind, where alone we enjoy some-
thing of the free communal delights of Athenian de-
mocracy. For Mind the Greeks stood. Even in the
conquests of Alexander, when, urged India- wards by
the omnipotential Principle whispering "Totality!
totality ! " he spread his Greek colonies as garrisons
far eastward as the Indus. For in time these made
the Greek tongue the polite and learned language
of the whole East. So that, as everybody knows,

340

THE GROWTH OF THE GREAT STATE

when the wreck of the Roman Empire left western
learning in darkness, Arabic translations of Aris-
totle's Ethics and Politics were being commented
on by Mussulmans in Timbuctoo. Greeks also,
though as mere provincials, supplied the language
and bureaucracy of the Byzantine Empire ; and be-
queathed their own popular democratic spirit to the
eastern form of Christianity, itself a great Greek
polity. But it is true that Hellas failed to form
an enduring federation; perhaps because, always
colonising and centrifugal, Athens failed as a political
centre ; perhaps partly because the age-long rivalry
of Sparta would not admit the supremacy of Athens.
But chiefly, I think, because larger, lower, and
coarser forms of Polity, owing in their making more
to Trade than to Thought, were required, at that
moment, to feed the peoples round the Mediter-
ranean basin. For the Greeks, Mind was more than
Life. The Roman polity, coarser in texture and at a
lower spiritual level than that of Athens, emerged,
instead, to meet those wider economic needs. Per-
haps the Family stood for less to the Greeks than to
the Latins. Certainly the Greeks gathered round
no Osirian religious myth, in which the Family be-
comes divine. The Roman system took as its core
rather the Life-centre than the Mind-centre ; it
stood for the hearth of the Family, the patria
potestas of the remotest Aryans. It radiated afresh
through all the craft or communal forms derived
from Egypt, Crete, the Hellas, and the East, the
energy of the primitive hearth-fire and Life force.

34r

THE GREAT STATE

These practical, hardy Latin farmers founded a re-
public and an empire on a farmsteading.' Their
colonies were not, like Alexander's colonies, mer-
cantile, but agricultural garrisons. Their Polity
grew crystallised, creeping from town to town, from
tribe to tribe, throughout five hundred years, round
a rude life at its roots agricultural.

But by the roads, the colonies, the system of
Caesar's legions and the Pandects of Justinian alone,
the Roman system would not have endured. The
imperial system of force and law derived from Sulla
and Caesar became aware that it lacked that rein-
forcement of kindly brotherhood which, after all,
the ancient and the barbarian had known in his
tribe and phratry. Therefore the Roman system
supplemented and allied itself with the Christian
religion ; a faith of which the very core was the
apotheosis and lifting-up of a human Family, as
the form and symbgl of the divine. The infant
Christ was worshipped lying before the hearth-fire
of Vesta. The Christian church, thus buttressing
the patria potestas, was the resurgence of the simple
peasant Family ideal applied to politics. The Vestal
orders became, in lineal succession, the sisterhoods
of Christ. Scattered ascetic hermits were gradually
gathered from their Thebaid desert-cells, to form
communal families of the spirit in Monasteries.
Later, monks an<l friars of Christianity undertook
to deal, in benign confraternity, with the outcast
and weaker elements of society ; to deal with them,
that is, as a Family. For the Family is the only

342

THE GROWTH OF THE GREAT STATE

sphere, in all Nature, wherein it is precisely the
weaker members who receive the greater love and
care. Thus the Christian system repaired, as well
as it might, the natural defects of the commercial
and military State. The Christian system dealt
with the childish scholar, the born wastrel-beggar,
the defective, the imbecile, the sick, the feeble
through age or infancy. It not only created
Hospitals, but revived Universities.

So, by the concert of strength and spirit, the civil
and religious systems of the Roman Empire formed
the wide basin of European civilisation. The Roman
system, assimilating in Caesar and Marcus Aurelius
much of the Greek culture, had assimilated also the
new Christian culture, and projected mightily and
afar, in this joint worship of the hearth, the dis-
cipline and the affection of the Family.

Now, despite the rise at the time of the Renais-
sance of the new modern nationalities, it is under
the shadow and amid the fragments of this immense
double Roman system of law and morals that we
still live; coloured only, throughout Europe and
South and North America, by the local custom,
common law, and climate, of each country.

VIII

The next main contribution to group-wisdom was
made by England. Her special gift was Repre-
sentation — the Representation of localities by
deputy. It is true that all forms of community

343

THE GREAT STATE

were historically in a sense delegations thrown off
by the Family unit ; but they were delegations that
in turn became themselves castes, bureaucracies,
or sub-polities between Family and ruler. These
skilled specialisations were apt to become alien and
impervious to the appeal of the unit that had given
them birth ; and with the increasing size of the
polity the problem has always been to refresh the
central executive with the counsel, and control it
by the will, of the Family ; as well as to gather the
Family's taxes.? Now all ancient polities, even
democratic polities, require the personal presence of
their tax-payers, if consulted at all. No systematic
employment of deputies was known to Egyptian,
Greek, or Roman. But England (which had de-
vised already the jury system, in which twelve men
of the locality represent and stand for the communal
sense in doing justice), from Saxon times, applied
the same principle to polities ; that is, applied the
principle of representation instead of presence, to
tax-paying and counselling and controlling the King.
Herein again, as always, we observe the economic
need creating and forecasting the trend of the consti-
tutional growth. The Saxon Township was the cell
from which the whole organic structure of our House
of Commons, or communities, has expanded. * Each
township sent a reeve and two or more elected men
to the hundred-moot. The hundred-moot or meeting
in turn sent a reeve and four men to the shire-moot.
Next the shire-moot sent (1275 a.d.) two knights
to the Parliament, while two burgesses were sum-

344

THE GROWTH OF THE GREAT STATE

moned from every borough. The House of Com-
mons was thus itself created by extremely cautious
and slow steps, harvesting at last, after three hun-
dred years, the chosen men of the shire-moots,
borough-moots, and townships into'a Parliament.
So, by representation, the Township Was put in
touch with the Crown, and the whole English polity
grew up knit into a marvellously solid structure,
astonishing by its unbroken series of cellular con-
nections between the people and the executive. But
this most ancient word "Township" first meant
nothing but the enclosure of a homestead within
its quick-set hedge. England, thus, in a manner,
taught modern Europe how to bring the Family to
bear on law-making, in the unwieldy modern Polity.
It was a device merely due to the increasing size
of nations. All modern constitutions, including
those of Latin South America and Japan, have
copied her device. But it will be observed that
Representation was a projection of the Family by
deputy ; a plan of which the flagrant fault is that
it does not require direct personal service from
every English citizen to the State. Hence the
signal lack of state loyalty in modern England.

But largely to extend the size of the polity,
beyond the range of direct personal service, tends
at first invariably to lower its central ethos and
moral tone. Further, the sexes may lose the natural
balance of their numbers. To the far new frontiers,
to the fighting-lines of the pioneer against Anangke,
disperse the younger, the more valiant and vigorous

345

THE GREAT STATE

men. At home remain the weakly, the town-bred,
the commercial, the sedentary, and above all that
tragic surplusage of women infertile, idle, or being
voteless, vilely underpaid, who increase the dulness,
the luxury, and the mass of prostitution in towns.

To remedy this at all costs, it is from the group-
wisdom of the Family that the modern State,
while absorbing and replacing the supplementary
humanitarianism of the churches, has still to learn.
As the organ of the collective conscience if the
state will replace the Church, it must include and
co-ordinate all the chance humanitaj-ian philan-
thropies hitherto left to religious societies. Poverty
and unemployment must be utterly done away
with. Else, the starved and maimed families of our
present terrible devitalised town areas will degrade
the . unthinking state that has bred them. This
process must plainly be reinforced by the endow-
ment of motherhood ; for it is not through the facile
service of the mother in the factory, to which she
is forced by dulness or by hunger, even during
child-bearing, that the greater home functions of
the Family, on which all depends, can be healthily
maintained.

What mockery is it, that the sheer weight of
armaments of modern nations, threatens, through
the weight of taxation, to crush into bloodless
poverty, the households of humble livelihood, and
to deform the Family, which the Polity itself was
originally created to protect and to subserve!

346

THE GROWTH OF THE GREAT STATE

IX

For if we seek Wisdom and Life, where do we
find Wisdom and Life at their purest ? Man has
to move in two regions, and to draw wisdom from
each. Two teachers only he has, the Family and
Anangke. First from the Family he learns, and
then from extended activities in the Polity which is
a delegation from (the human wall round) the sanc-
tities of the Family. Secondly, from Anangke he
learns ; that is, from the hard and bracing Universe,
unguided by Finite Mind, whence the Family itself
first issued.

From direct and solitary contacts of the mind
with Anangke all the mystics (and every man is
partly mystic) can draw, by intense and controlled
meditation, a sense of cosmic consciousness and
fellowship with the roll of the world ; a joy of free
kinship with the elements themselves; an ecstatic
union with that undiiFerentiated Spirit lying within
the soul, to which all can have access,, and which
the Indians call Brahm. The solitary contact with
Anangke culminates in Death, supreme Necessity.

But the finest, most subtilised, and most delicate
forms of wisdom Man derives from the Family.
This is the school of all judgment ; fount of political
measure and sense of proportion. The family lies
upon the breast of Anangke, but differs in law. It
is the forge of all the loves. Here reside the central
Wisdoms and Fires of life. Only in the Family do

347

THE GREAT STATE

we find Ordered Love, the perfect combination of
the two centres, Life and Mind. Its sheltered
atmosphere of the passions and affections intro-
duces conscience, shapes character and the sense
of character, and alone renders morality intelligible.
Love such as that between Man and Wife,
Mother and Child, Child and Mother, is not emo-
tional only, but also the supremest kind of intelli-
gence — an intelligence that feels forth after the
past and future of its object, grasping and en-
swathing it with memory and foresight, and a
tenderness absolutely limitless in its dreams and
reaches of intuition. To the depth and quality of
this kind of understanding, all other understand-
ings are as nothing. In such almost silent and
selfless Love, the blindly moving omnipotential
Principle surges everywhere out of the ground of
the world, and is seen disengaged, glowing, naked,
pure, and at play. Created by and round that life-
glow one discerns the true Family; the under-
group of the four wrinkled and elder persons
nearing the subsidence of death, the two central
and mature, the three or four young ; and beyond
them, in twilight, the outer kindred. All political
thinking has been obscured by taking the individual
as the human unit. There are no abstract social
truths about individuals. Could our custom-blind
vision pierce the physical surfaces of society to
behold its real shaping forces, it would see cells,
cup-like shapes of group-consciousness and emo-
tion, floating perpetually, invisibly, over the globe,

348

THE GROWTH OF THE GREAT STATE

like thistledown over grasses; their childish
edges touching other groups, then mingling and
floating off; while the parent centres rise, con-
tinue a while, shrink, subside and disappear,
making room for other cellular forms. Social
truth is what is true for this invisible group of
nine Persons, of both sexes and all ages. Through
its sifting and purifying all ideas must pass to
endure. The voice of the Family is a blent and
chorded voice, a nine-fold set of Pan-pipes ; ironic,
soft, laughing, austere, sorrowful, savage, fraternal.
He who would think and feel aright must have
heard them all, and heard when he was young. It
is by this group, this glowing organic cell of nine
persons (each no mere numeral of the statistician,
but a fountain of passions, dreams, and hungers),
that the nature of all Polity is dictated. For if
Polity is formed, and if the common heart and will
of that cell be not satisfied, the polity fades, as the
European kingdoms of Napoleon faded. In foster-
ing warmth of affection, playing on the child, is
that which forms character, but it forms more than
character — brain. For that emotional glow has
not only an emotional effect. Where affection is
absent, the whole growth of the child's nature
is stunted. True growth is secret, shy, and free.
The child, highly sensitive, is absolutely defenceless.
Therefore, there must be absence of fear. Where
the mother-warmth is not turned on the naked ten-
derness of the young child the fibres of its whole
being, frozen into timidities, shrink, and are

349

THE GREAT STATE

stunted. The strange effect of fear, then, is that it
cancels the free joys and curiosities of the newly
searching brain, and causes it to withdraw its feelers.
The child's frame is thereby impoverished not only
in emotions, but in all its facultlies. Where no
strong familial and emotional glow has been early
felt I have observed in later life a poorer, thinner,
flightier quality of brain evolved. It is the quick
flimsy brain of the gamin. If the child be deprived
early of the fusing and tempering effect of feeling
and response to maternal love, there follows a
permanent loss of equipoise. Even natures gifted
as those of Ibsen, the younger Mill, and Ruskin
were in consequence peculiarly apt in advanced age
to lose emotional balance, at the shock of unac-
customed sexual and emotional explosions. Such
often become the prey of sudden attachments,
insane and disastrous, because belated.

Let no exceptional bias of that embittered outcast,
the writer or artist, mislead us in this matter. If
a man has not in childhood, and for years, watched
in their interactions the steady group of the Family,
surmising in his child-mind the thousandfold subtle-
ties of their invisible intercourse and growth, he
has missed the core of all the humanities, and lost
the scale of values, which must be learned in child-
hood or not at alL Such an one can only deal
purblindly with the fragments of the families of
others. Compared to the childish experiences of
love and intelligence felt and returned, all other
experiences are shallow. They bear the same

350

THE GROWTH OF THE GREAT STATE

relationship to the man's later acquirements and
experience as the enormous submerged achieve-
ments of bestial Man, in ascending to the successive
levels of the senses developed out of Touch ; and
then to speech, fire, pottery, and the arrow, bear to
all his later inventions. To this Vision and feeling
for the group on which he is dependent, and from
which all the skilled polities extend, we owe all
real education. The nobler thoughts and emotions
are group-thoughts and group-emotions. Effective
religion and ethics are results of familial thinking,
not of individual intelligence. At this source are
felt the play of the very essences of Joy, Sympathy,
ajid Discipline ; and these three combined are
Wisdom. Therefore, it is in the inmost sheltered
ring of the mother's tacit insight and provision, and
the outer ring of provision by the father, that the
child learns in the cross-currents of the cell the
whole complex of Life; with its food, toys, cere-
monial magic, exercises and battles, its folk-lore
read out by the fire, the wordless comment of the
eye felt observing, the reluctant thrashing held in
reserve, the trade and barter of childish property,
the joys of exploration, the intoxication of mere
carnival and riot. All these enter into the judgment,
and absolutely and finally create it, and all its later
values.

The political economist often merely darkens
counsel by pretentious technicalities ©f language.
The economy of a State differs in little, save scale,
from the economy of a household. The child also

351

THE GREAT STATE

knows more — that its mother is the economist of
spiritual forces, shielding and directing and turning
souls this way or that. By mass and scale we are
deceived. What are the wars of States more than
the bickerings and bouts of children ? The average
man acts on three distinct criteria of conduct, in
three successive concentric circles : the familial, the
legal, and the predatory. He applies the outermost
and last to all strangers and to the uncivilised.
And yet, and yet . . . seer, prophet, poet, and
philosopher have had to die in legions merely to
drive home the bare fact that, if the world is to
improve, it is solely by projection through the
world of the Family, with its subtler and more
intimate values and its atmosphere of love and
personal service. The State has to learn from
the home — and not the home from State — that by
the " kingdom of God " was actually meant, in
fact, the spirit of the Family, propelled through
myriads of undulations and resistances, to the ends
of the earth; there destined to create a meeting
and equipoise of forces, and thence to undulate
backward, through the structure of all polities,
spreading its strength, its discipline, and its
enlightenment of life.

Since War will assuredly continue so long as
there are tracts of the world not effectively occupied
or supervised by civilised states, because till then

352

THE GROWTH OF THE GREAT STATE

there must be collisions between states rushing to
occupy, common sense would seem to dictate to the
stiff and snarling Chancelleries of Europe to lay
aside their canine dignities, and, calriily, by inter-
national committee, at once to assign spheres of
influence over all the virgin soil or the fallow areas.
Men will shortly see the costly armaments of
modern nations left stranded high and utterly
extinct; hulks empty and abandoned as those
jutting ruined castles that dominate the passes of
the Alps. Till then all polities will be arresting
their own growth; and will delay the cure of
poverty, by making heavier the weight of their
defences.

And it would also seem clear that some new
neutral kind of International Power should be called
into existence (as the Universities were called in the
Middle Ages). Of what nature should this new
Power be ? It should provide a point of rest, in
neutral zones, for the due economy, in the common
weal, of all those influences which ignore national
boundaries and for which frontiers have no meaning.
The following universal interests certainly imply
a universal bond. There is a common need of food
and fear of death ; a common delight in all the arts,
especially in music. The intercourse of distant
universities, the congresses and communicated
records of all scientific bodies, the sweeping
collective influences of emigration, the implied
fundamentals of all high systems of ethics, of
religions and the missions they send; the ever-

353 2 A

THE GREAT STATE

expanding network of travel and world-wandering;
the nets of electricity and steam. Added to these,
the overwhelming unities of commerce and banking.
All these things imply a streaming mass of universal
interests, a world-force which may be gathered and
utilised, framed into a new international Power,
modelled perhaps on Universities combined with
Chambers of Commerce ; and given, as seats,
enclaves of territory or neutral spheres, in the
southern and northern hemispheres, on each
continent.

The Omnipotential Principle tends as though
blindly to enlarge the size of the Polity, seeking
universal stability and fertilisation of the whole globe
by Life and Mind. But outward peace and stability
once attained, as it will be attained, in the Greater
State, the size of the polity may again diminish to
Attic limits, as of the small Italian or Swiss re-
publics, within range of direct personal service, and
of the powers of the Family to purify. And if War
between nations vanishes, it is clear that, in order to
preserve Life at a high level, severe internal dis-
ciplines must be retained in each polity. Anangke,
on whose breast the Family itself reposes, and the
omnipotential principle behind Life and Mind, will
see to that. Youth, which should freely pass at
adolescence out of the discipline of the home to that
of the school, will have to acquire all the ancient

354

THE GROWTH OF THE GREAT STATE

successive indurations and disciplines; imposed now
amidst wider choices of employment afforded by ex-
panding spheres of civilisation. Above all, direct
personal service to the state of all young persons
should be required. The whole youth of the
country between fourteen and twenty years of age
should be obliged to learn some technical pursuit
during at least half the day. The rest of their time
may go to leisure, play, and Anangke. One year
should be given to pass each through some public
service of a defensive discipline, or a dangerous or
a repugnant kind, in order to brace and temper Life. '
Above twenty years of age every individual should
be encouraged to choose an avocation with the
utmost freedom, remembering only that that work
is worth most to the state, into which a man's whole
weight, from the centres of his being, can be thrown.

XII

Finally, given the preservation of the Family, the
formation of the greater areas of civilisation, which
we have seen is proceeding, plainly enriches the
world, through the influx and admixture of a larger
number of stocks and races, with, therefore, better
chances of cross-fertilisation. All new inventions
are thrown into a cauldron of more manifold oppor-
tunity. The growth of area insures the destiny of
Man against adverse chances by spreading his bases
of resource and action wider, and by drawing raw
material from vaster orbits of climate.

355

THE GREAT STATE

And yet it remains that only in the person of
great individuals df genius can these multitudinous
elements fuse, by a detonating spark, into fresh in-
ventions for humanity. After our debts to Chance
and Anangke, we owe most to Genius. We owe to
it, indeed, far more than invention. It is to Genius
and to the Family that humanity owes such equi-
poise, love, and simplifying vision as it has attained.
Genius is conscience and consciousness at its whitest
heat, bearing the subtlest implications of the Family
most clearly and steadily in mind. But the soul of
a child of genius requires to live long encysted and
ensheathed before it flowers. Encysted, first, in the
warmth of love ; and then in solitude, as were the
shy souls of Shelley or Christ The strength of
Genius lies in its ignorances. For this child is Life
itself, free and pure ; older than its father, and abler
to resort afresh to the primordial fountains. All that
Polity, after the Family, can add to the instinctive
endowment of the child is knowledge of the technical
languages of the crafts, and of the various disciplines
necessary to deal with his fellows, and to meet
Anangke. But the roots of judgment on these must
be learned in the Family. The best teachers of any
father are his own children. The Polity and the
World have not, in the main, much to teach the child.
Rather they have to learn from the ultimate judg-
ments of the Family and the Child. These are the
lawgivers from whom all the values radiate.

3S6

THE TRADITION OF THE GREAT STATE

BY HUGH P. VOWLES

K-

XIII
THE TRADITION OF THE GREAT STATE

Tradition always has been and always will be
a dominant factor in human association. Yet this
is extraordinarily disregarded in contemporary dis-
ciission; at most, tradition is currently considered
and discussed as exerting a diminishing influence in
the onward sweep of civilisation. The purpose of
this paper is to point out that tradition, great as
its influence has been hitherto, is manifestly des-
tined to exert a far greater influence in the future.
And, the relation between tradition and formal edu-
cation being very intimate, this function of Great
State activities will receive especial consideration in
this paper. To discuss tradition is in fact to discuss
education. ^^

No one will dispute that tradition dominates the
Normal Social Life. Primitive men found in the
beginnings of speech a means whereby to build up
and transmit from generation to generation those
superstitions, legends, prejudices, habits, and cus-
toms developed by conflict between man and his
environment. Intensely localised, each group would
have its particular ideas which would become the

359

THE GREAT STATE

substance of an education admirably fitted to meet
the needs of man under this form of association.
We see that such an education, though varying from
group to group, would have two leading character-
istics. First it would be limited in amount, and
secondly it would be stereotyped. So long as the
relations between man and his environment are
limited and unchanging, not only must there soon be
a limit to the development and increase of tradition,
but there can be little further modification of its
character. That is, tradition is the outcome of re-
lationship, and the Normal Social Life, as we writers
conceive it, is correlated with a general absence of
those disturbing forces, the tendency of which is to
produce new relationships and, therefore, new and
more elaborate tradition. Thus we find the Normal
Social Life still persisting over vast tracts of earth
to-day, primitive and fundamentally unchanged by
the passage of time and having an extraordinary
uniformity of tradition in, regard to all the funda-
mental social relationships. Fallacious though the
clap-trap talked about "unchanging human nature"
often is, it approximates the truth when applied to
communities most nearly in the phrase of the
Normal Social Life.

But of course tradition has never been absolutely
inflexible or unprogressive. Always a number of
forces have been producing new ways of living, new
relationships, new modifications of tradition. And
if one believes, as we believe, that these extraneous

360

THE TRADITION OP THE GREAT STATE

influences are becoming of rapidly increasing im-
portance in relation to the Normal Social Life, it
follows that tradition, instead of disappearing, will
become more important than ever by reason of the
resulting modifications in its character and range.
Its potency, an interpretation and discipline of re-
lationship, will need to be increased to a hitherto
undreamed-of degree. Herein will be the essential
value of tradition. The possibilities of a Great
State must ultimately depend on the quality and har-
mony of its collective thought; and, that thought
may be collective, it must rest on a broad basis of
tradition, of interaction and understanding, common
to all. Unless this amplified tradition is common
to every citizen and to every child born into the
community, the epithet "great" as defining that
commimity will be misapplied. The development
of such a community will be hampered on every side,
and at last arrested by the appearance of a multitude
of sects and castes, of specialised classes, suspicious
and contemptuous of everything beyond their own
peculiar circles of thought. Sectarianism is, as it
were, an infantile disease of the Great State, and
has slain hitherto every fresh attempt to exist of
the Great State. Mutuality, co-operation, efficient
criticism, and subtlety of thought are alike impos-
sible; effort is fragmentary and wasteful, and the
community has as little mastery over its destinies
as an ailing child unless its tradition is adequate
and universal.

361

THE GREAT STATE

Now, amplification of tradition in the past has
always been accompanied by increasing range of
intercourse. Those primitive men who wandered
away from the tribe and survived, and perhaps re-
turned or were fused into some alien group, would be
certain to widen not only their own range of inter-
course, but also that of those with whom they came
in contact. No matter what influence brought man
into touch with new relationships — ^it was more often
than not slave-trading and war — ^this would be the
probable result.

Not necessarily was the bringing into touch direct
contact. With the invention of writing, tradition
ceased to be ptirely oral : henceforth it could be re-
corded and multiplied and transmitted from a dis-
tance, from here to there, and from one age to
another. Range of intercourse widened enormously,
and more than ever it became possible to experience
new relationships, as it were, vicariously — a thing
already possible in a limited degree since the de-
velopment of speech. Thus, step by step, tradition
expanded and grew. . . .

From these considerations it is easy to pass on to
the proposition that the school education of the
Great State, so far as it enlarges and supplements the
oral education of the Normal Social Life — so far, that
is, as it is an adjustment of the new citizen to the
larger society in which he finds himself — ^must be
essentially a traning in enlarged communications
and the study of midtitudinous relationships — ^must

362

THE TRADITION OP THE GREAT STATE

be essentially the imparting of the Great State
tradition and its methods of enlargement.

Let us consider briefly the methods likely to be
adopted to invigorate the general process of thought
and to organise those forces which will be carrying
on, modifying, and enlarging the collective body of
tradition. There we reach what is probably the most
vital consideration of aU, the problem upon a solu-
tion of which the project of a Great State depends.

The study of communication in the education of
the citizen of the Great State will probably be dealt
with under various heads, such as language-training,
drawing, painting, sculpture, and the Hke; mathe-
matics, logic, and other symbolical methods.
Whether there is likely to be one or several languages
in current use is a question upon which it is impos-
sible to form a judgment. It is another matter, how-
ever, to glance at general tendencies and from them
form a plausible deduction. Here the accumulative
growth of disturbing forces and influences points to
certain probabilities. The immediate and most
obvious outcome of these forces is the extraordinary
extent to which man is being delocalised in both
body and mind. One has only to think of such
recent inventions as the electric telegraph, telephone,
wireless telegraphy, steam and electric tractions,
the motor-car and motor-vehicles of every descrip-
tion, the ocean Uner and the aeroplane, to see how
quite common men to-day are enabled to sweep out
ever - widening circles of mental and physical ac-

363

THE GREAT STATE

tivity. Think of the stupendous growth of the
penny-post alone! All these are things so recent
that the effect upon human mentality can scarcely
as yet be beginning. Bearing this in mind, it is
difficult to believe that a multiplicity of languages,
and all the barriers to the broadening of intellect that
such a multiplicity implies, will prevail for long
before the systematic enlargement of the means of
communication which will be a distinctive charac-
teristic of the Great State. While it is not within
the scope of this essay to consider whether one lan-
guage will overcome its rivals or whether there will
be a world language resulting from the fusion of
several existing tongues, it should be noted that the
substitution of one general language for the babel
of to-day would itself widen enormously the range
of a general intercourse and tradition. In this con-
nection we may remember that the Great State has
been defined as a social system world-wide in its
interests and outlook. Language-teaching would be
greatly simplified. Having but one language to
learn, there would be some prospect of the average
citizen acquiring a really comprehensive knowledge
of his tongue, which is far from being the case ia
any community to-day. How many contemporary
English-speaking people know more than a tithe of
their own language? Even the little knowledge they
have is vague and misapprehensive to an astonishing
degree. Much muddled thought in contemporary
life springs from an imperfect apprehension of the

364

THE TRADITION OF THE GREAT STATE

written and spoken language. No attempt is made
to provide our youth with a liberally inclusive
vocabulary. One's knowledge of English is often
found on examination to be — ^no other word seems
so apposite — jerry built. New words are acquired at
random through reading and intercourse, a loose and
distorted significance often being gathered from the
context.

Language-training, then, must involve the acquisi-
tion of a vocabulary of the greatest possible content,
each word in which must be thoroughly understood
if such training is not to fail of its essential purpose,
and through that work of definition and enlargement
the amplification of tradition and thought to more
and more spacious horizons, and the bringing of
every citizen into understanding contact with that
tradition. As to drawing and music, it is possible
these will be taught chiefly as a means of expressing
thoughts and emotions which cannot be communi-
cated in words. Again, mathematics resolves on
analysis into a system of symbol communication.
Consideration will presently be given to the idea —
glanced at in the opening essay — of a change in oc-
cupation being normal to the life of every citizen.
Here it may be remarked that changes of occupa-
tion would be greatly facilitated by a wide-spread
and thorough knowledge of mathematics, since the
occupations involving such a knowledge form a con-
siderable portion of present-day activities. No one
can hope to be a competent astronomer without a

36s

THE GREAT STATE

knowledge of mathematics. Most of the physical
sciences require its aid. Even music involves
njathematics in its last analysis. Great armies of
people calling themselves engineers would be tm-
able to achieve their ends without this science, and
everywhere we find a rapidly increasing number of
men engaged in physical research and the application
of scientific deductions to technical ends, the quality
of the results being commensurate with the mathe-
matical knowledge possessed by those carrying out
the investigations. An endless diversity of intricate
machinery grows and spreads about the earth, and
a mathematician has taken a part in the evolution
of every machine that is well proportioned and care-
fully designed. Even to-day people ignorant of
mathematics show a disposition towards either an
ignorant hatred or a superstitious awe of most of
the beautiful apparatus that binds our civilisation
together.

A superficial observer might argue that with the
growth of knowledge standardisation of machinery
and formulee will ensue to such an extent that a
general and advanced knowledge of mathematics
will be unnecessary. No such hope is supported by
the tendencies of contemporary engineering. The
nearer the approach to perfection in any machine,
the greater the subtlety and refinement of calcu-
lation required. Moreover, machines no sooner
approach the measure of perfection possible to
them than some new discovery is made which ren-

366

THE TRADITION OP THE GREAT STATE

ders the whole design of that machine obsolescent.
A good example of this is the present partial replace-
ment of reciprocating steam-engines by the steam-
turbine, which involves a whole host of new and
intricate calculations. The increasing application of
internal-combustion engines to ship-propulsion and
the coming of the aeroplane place vast new fields of
research at the disposal of the engineer with a knowl-
edge of mathematics; and it may be that engineering
problems will continue to increase in complexity and
in universality of interest till at last our remote
progeny will be within reach of the possibility of a
system of controls of the earth's velocity, and will
steer our planet nearer and nearer the sun as its heat
and splendour wane. . . . But I have wandered away
from my point, which is that mathematics, together
with language-training and those activities of expres-
sion usually referred to collectively as "art," will
form the necessary basis of education in the Great
State — not the education, but the basis and means
of education. To consider these fundamentals in
greater detail would be to pass beyond the bounds of
this essay. Let me, therefore, return now to a more
general consideration of tradition in relation to the
Great State.

It should, of course, be remembered that while
the leading characteristic of tradition in the future
will be its insistence on personal adaptability and its
secular modification and development, there must
always be a group of ideas that will persevere over

367

THE GREAT STATE

long periods practically unchanged. Many of the
needs of men are long-lived, and it is an open ques-
tion whether most if not all of our present-day tradi-
tions will not go on to a fuller and completer influence
in the lives of the citizens of the Great State. That
large body of tradition we speak of as Christianity,
for example, may conceivably serve as the basis of the
moral tradition in the Great State. This matter is,
I believe, to be discussed more fully in another
paper in this book, but the present writer now ven-
tures to offer a few remarks that seem to fall within
his scope. In many ways he admits Christian tra-
dition has been a beneficial factor in our evolution.
Its teaching of love and concord is of the very essence
of the Great State. Whatever broadens the basis of
sympathy and mutual understanding is a force
operating in the constructive direction, and so it
would seem probable that Christianity will at least
survive in its spirit and intermingle with the more
elaborate traditions of the future. In no case can a
tradition disappear without leaving behind it some
effect or influence. But this is far from asserting
that there need be or will be a definite survival of
Christianity as such. Contemporary Christianity
must purge itself from a multitude of defects before it
can possibly be acceptable to the clear-headed men
who will be the normal citizens of the Great State.
A mere spirit of co-operation alone can never be all-
s\ifficing for the religious basis of tradition. The
Great State will be complex beyond all precedent;

■368

THE TRADITION OF THE GREAT STATE

and that he may cope successfully with these com-
plexities, the average citizen must be trained to think
clearly and exhaustively, and be given a wealth of
tradition for his guidance multifarious beyond any
the world has yet produced. Christianity as we
know it at present makes no insistence upon under-
standing and mental alertness as duties, nor upon
the supreme necessity of thoroughness in thought
and work. It is not a critical religion; it is emotion-
ally sound, perhaps, but critically careless, and the
vital preservative of right in a complex situation is a
critical faculty highly stimulated and fed.

It woiild be impertinent to discuss so detailed
a thing as the probable tradition of the future in
relation to moral ends. But it seems clear that we
have to look rather to a living literatiu'e and drama,
and it may be to a living pulpit for that perpetual
stream of criticism which is the life-blood of a great
commtmity, which indeed must be deliberately
fostered with a view to the continual reinvigoration
of tradition and thought if the Great State is to
remain in health. Quite possibly there wiU be no
definite "moral" teaching by way of precept in the
Great State in the sense in which "moral" is com-
monly understood to-day. The tendency of liberal
thought to-day seems to be altogether away from
definite moral controls towards a latitude which
implies alternately that relationship should be
judged upon its merits. We are slowly learning
that no moral code can be framed of general appli-

369 2 B

THE GREAT STATE

cation without a vast amount of limitation and
injustice in individual cases. The writer believes
that if the Great State is to be possible at all, the
traditional atmosphere surrounding each individual,
from his youth up, must be such that a sense of
social conduct will become intuitive. He will do
right because his atmosphere is right, and not because
his definite instructions are right. Meanwhile, on
our way to the Great State, all moral laws and judg-
ments, all arbitrary pronouncements regarding moral
questions, must be submitted without bigotry and
without prejudice to detailed scrutiny and criticism.
. The age in which we live is characterised by the
unprecedented intricacy of its relationships. Com-
plex problems face us on every side. We are,, as it
were, entangled in a net, and in the measure that our
schemes of extrication are dully conceived, carelessly
and weakly planned, we shall be more and more
hopelessly involved. Never was the need for pene-
trating analysis and criticism so pressing. Con-
sider, for instance, the problem of the official and his
relationship to the normal citizen — all the possi-
bilities of demoralisation by office and the loss of
sympathy of the citizen towards the oflScial. How
will criticism, aided by a fund of spacious tradition,
be directed to the solution of such problems as these?
Whatever demoralisation takes place in an official
is partly due to the fact that he is a specialist — ^that
is, a human being who has narrowed the sphere of
his activity at the expense of his social instincts,

370

THE TRADITION OF THE GREAT STATE

thereby becoming but a fraction of a man. He
sees a field of activities as brightly lit, perhaps,
but as limited as the field of a microscope; and not
infrequently it is as though the microscope was a
Uttle out of focus. There is a blurring as of things
too close to the eyes to be distinctly seen. More-
over, office usually implies a power over his fellows
which inevitably breeds first pride and then corrup-
tion in little minds. Speaking generally, an official's
pleasure in the direction and regulation of other
people's lives is inversely proportional to his mental
capacity and range. Amplification of tradition should
therefore carry us at least half-way to a solution of
this problem. Let it be granted that every child will
acquire from his parents, his teachers, and his fellow-
creatures a spacious and comprehensive outlook on
life in all its manifold aspects and relationships, and
it follows that the suspicions, prejudices, jealousies,
the lack of sympathy and of generosity of dealing
which are too often the concomitants of oflficialdom
to-day, will be almost non-existent in the Great
State. It is conceivable that constitutional methods
such as change of office, short terms of office, would
suffice to eliminate whatever remains of this, the
supreme difficulty of aU constructive projects.

And here perhaps I may venture to offer a few
remarks upon specialists and specialisation in
general.

It is a characteristic of specialisation that it
encourages the fragmentation of human thought

371'

THE GREAT STATE

and effort. Essentially it belongs to the era of
localised tradition and limited outlook and is every-
where reflected in the castes, cliques, cults, and
classes which are so familiar a feature of the earlier
social superstructures upon the Normal Social Life
such as we find in India. It multiplies to infinity the
possibilities of misunderstanding, jealousy, hatred,
and dissention. We cannot here consider the his-
torical aspect of specialisation in detail, but a general
survey indicates that it originated in the segregation
of the rulers, warriors, priests, t aders, and slaves
who until recent years formed the backbone of prac-
tically every human community. The caste system
of India originated in this manner some three
thousand years ago, developing in course of time into
the most elaborate system of specialisation on record;
and nowhere is the Normal Social Life more firmly
rooted as the common way of living and its tradition
as the universal tradition than in India. It must,
however, be clearly understood that specialisation
is not necessarily peculiar to the Normal Social Life.
There can be few ideas more prevalent than those of
domination, subordination, and specialisation; and
since the ideas with which humanity is most familiar
have a strong tendency to perpetuation it is con-
ceivable that the persistence of these ideas into a
period of change and comprehensive reconstruction
may yet lead to a social order in which the bulk
of humanity will be almost as specialised in function
as the wheels and levers of a machine, and subordi-

372

THE TRADITION OF THE GREAT STATE

s
nated to and co-ordinated by a small class of wealthy,
vigorous, and probably truculent overseers and "un-
derstanding persons" — ^in short, a Servile State. If,
therefore, we are to escape both from the evils of the
Normal Social Life and from those of the possible
Servile State, we must systematically encourage
forces adverse to specialisation of individuals. A
tradition of liberalism and criticism must be con-
sciously sustained. Granting that in the Great
State each citizen will be brought into contact with
the broadening influence of a cathoHc tradition, it is
possible there will be no specialists at all in the or-
dinary sense of the word. That there may be a degree
of specialisation in certain lives is quite probable.
Not only has knowledge grown beyond the possi-
bilities of individual intellectual grasp, but always
there are men who at an early age show predilections
for a certain class of work; and in so far as they
excel in that work they will, no doubt, be specialists.
But this need not involve, as it so often involves
now, the atrophy of all those possibilities of de-
velopment not brought to bear on the matter im-
mediately in hand. A man will be able to specialise
and yet remain a man. The tradition of his time
and education, the new tradition of the Great State,
will have »fitted him to tackle widely differing
classes of work; and even if he devotes his life to one
field of narrowed limits determined by his special
capacity, he will stiU have a sympathetic under-
standing of those activities which lie beyond his

373 2 B 2

THE GREAT STATE

self-imposed range. With the normal run of human-
ity, however, it seems probable that change of work
from time to time wiU give the best results for both
the individual in happiness and for the community in
product. It is extremely doubtful whether any man
is a good and happy specialist all his life, any more
than he can always be a good and happy lover.
Even a lifetime wholly of work, albeit enlivened
and enlarged by repeated changes of occupation, will
probably be considered as regrettable in the Great
State. To work, as to love, is but a phase in man's
development. A balanced attitude towards life
demands lengthy intervals of leisure, time for
travel and recreation, periods devoted to thought
and exercise, days of solitude and contemplation.
Stevenson has pointed out that extreme busyness
is a symptom of deficient vitality, and that a faculty
for idleness — as opposed to the exercise of some con-
ventional occupation — implies a cathoUc appetite and
a strong sense of personal identity. This is pro-
foundly true; and to concentrate the whole or even
the greater part of a lifetime on any one aspect of life
to the complete or partial neglect of all others is a
waste of potentialities and by so much essentially
a failure to live.

It seems to the present writer that there is a cer-
tain cycle of efficiency for the average human being.
Every man's development as a worker appears to
follow some law of accumulation and fatigue which
involves first a period of interest combined with a

374

THE TRADITION OF THE GREAT STATE

certain lack of dexterity, then an interval of maxi-
mum interest and maximum efficiency, followed at
length by a decline towards routine. Interest in
most cases begins to flag before efficiency shows
any serious signs of falling away, for after work
has been well executed for a number of years me-
chanical aptitude may keep one going, though fresh-
ness and zeal have departed. An interesting side
issue here would be to consider whether, generally
speaking, our judges, bishops, admirals, and generals
are not appointed at a period of life when fire and
enthusiasm are declining and a certain staleness and
secondary inefficiency are setting in. As a matter
of fact, there comes to most specialists a time when
they are glad to retire from the work to which
they have devoted the greater portion of their lives.
But this by no means necessarily indicates that their
energies are exhausted. They are tired of their
specialty, and at last comes a reaching-out to other
things about which to centre their activities. Such
names as Mr. Balfour, Lord Rosebery, and Sir
Frederic Treves may be cited as British instances of
this cessation of interests in a special occupation.
The last is a particularly good example of a man who,
having attained to an extreme eminence as a surgeon,
retired deliberately while still in the prime of life
to travel, to write, to become a more generalised
man.

Now, bearing in mind the ample tradition and
education of the Great State and the fact that

375

THE GREAT STATE

mechanism and co-ordinated efJort will have reduced
the unavoidable work for each individual to a few
hours a day, it is not diflSctilt to imagine a man
under these conditions spending a portion of his
leisure in familiarising himself with the details of
some occupation other than that primarily engaging
his attention. As interest in his earlier occupation
relatively or actually declines and proficiency in the
new increases, the latter becomes the chief meditun
for the exercise of his faculties. Thus the normal
citizen in the Great State may range over very wide
fields of work indeed, broadening in outlook and
understanding, growing in sympathy and toleration.
And I think in all discussions as this there is too
strong a disposition to that idea of a three or four
hour_ working day. Why not a ten-year working
life? — and do it jolly and hard while you are
at it?

It may be argued that the result of such a reduc-
tion of speciaHsation as I am suggesting would be a
community of incompetent amateurs. Such an argu-
ment ignores the fact that the very possibility of a
Great State postulates a wealth of tradition and edu-
cation available for each citizen, thus insuring knowl-
edge and thoroughness being applied to whatever
work is taken in hand. No doubt there may be
differences in quality of output. Work may be
crudely done here, elaborately and beautifully fin-
ished there. This does not invalidate our general
proposition.

376

THE TRADITION OF THE GREAT STATE

At the present time there is far too general an
acquiescence in the specialisation of individuals.
Common people are dazzled by the brUhant light
often focussed by the specialist on his specialty;
they forget the worlds which, lying beyond the range
of his imaginative grasp, the specialist cannot realise.
And they fail to understand that a community of
specialists must inevitably lack collective vision and
understanding by reason of the inco-ordination of
its units. The specialist may take you nearer the
Great State in all sorts of ways, but it is very doubt-
ful if he will ever get you or himself there. No
attempt is being made to study the possible reac-
tions of specialisation on the human mind. One
thinks of specialists who are secretive and cunning,
of specialised business men who prefer to. work behind
the scenes and who delight in letters that are "private
and confidential." One thinks of the artful bureau-
cratic expert and the dull but crafty and intriguing
diplomat. How far is all this "foxiness" mere co-
incidence, and how far is it a necessary characteristic
of specialisation? This is but one of a countless
number of such questions that must be answered on
our way to the Great State. For his own part the
writer cannot conceive any sort of Great State that
will endure a year, where education, where tradition,
does not first make its citizen a gentleman, and
then,'; in a relation entirely secondary, a specialised
worker.

But already this discussion of specialisation has
377

THE GREAT STATE

been carried beyond the limits of this paper. That so
much contemporary writing expresses the conviction
that any possible future state must be dominated by
specialists and officials (using the words in their
generally accepted sense of narrow concentration)
will perhaps serve as an adequate excuse. The
writer firmly believes in the possibility of a Great
State which will include neither official as such nor
specialist as such, a state in which this that he here
throws out so sketchUy will probably have been fully
worked out; but he also believes that, without hav-
ing at its base some such tradition and education as
he has indicated, no Great State can possibly exist.
Amplification of tradition, increasing enlargement of
the means of communication, together with educa-
tion developed to these ends, forming a foundation
for vigorous, subtle, and all-embracing thought —
these are otu: fundamental needs. Herein lie the
seeds of unparalleled greatness, possibilities of devel-
opment leading to ways of life more splendid than all
our dreams.

Is it possible to have a world of men such that
merely to live in it were a liberal education? The
question is already answered. We of this book say:
on certain conditions, yes. Dimly we perceive the
road which, leading thither, winds darkly outwards
across the centuries. There are ways leading else-
where; humanity may take the wrong turning, and
may yet be overwhelmed in a Red Sea of petty,
trivial, immediate things. There are times, indeed,

378

THE TRADITION OP THE GREAT STATE

when lack of faith gives the lie to one^s hopes and
the vision of a Great State wavers and fades. . . .

The permutations of life's possibilities are beyond
our telling. But this at least we steadfastly believe:
there is no insuperable barrier between mankind and
the goal of our desire.

THE END

PRIKTED BY

WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITffi>,

LONDON AND lECCLBS.